You know its a wet summer when snails feast on the cat kibble.

I dug into obscure Japanese viruses so you did not have to. How about a virus as priority boot device? No, not booting the infected disk. Booting the virus. www.linkedin.com/pulse/unforg...

Unforgotten: Sharp and the reboot survivors

The title sounds like a niche 80'ies synth band. But no, this is another story about retro malware.

linkedin.com

@spaf.me Sent you an email to you job addy. There's no rush, so I won't say it is, but its not spam either. Happy sabbatical. PS: I never thought about using those words as part of my vocabulary, but now I have an urge to. argh.

Another malware type dug out from the *almost* forgotten past. www.linkedin.com/pulse/unforg...

Unforgotten: The MSX viruses

Sometimes you just find stuff. While researching another project, a search brought up a forum post from MSX.

linkedin.com

Har det skjedd noe på Gibostad? Brann eller noe?

NASA FIRMS is not bad at spotting heat. In fact, some of the feeds seem to be better at spotting industrial heat sources than wildfires - here, it sees the ferromanganese smelter at Sauda, Norway. The circle shows the margin of error from a previous plot.

Litt ironisk FP eller kreativt ansettelsestriks: E-tjenestens jobbannonse blokkeres av Telenor. Annonsen ender opp hos webcruiter, så den SER jo legit ut - men ring, for sikkerhets skyld.

April is fun. It's like nature wants to make sure you cannot be entirely sure the winter is over. Here; have some snow <flwomp>.

I *think* I've known only one Hungarian person - my old doctor. Pointed at me and said "bit fat, yeah?". Showed me a huge handful of biscuits; "you need to stay away from these"; before he wolfed them down. Liked him straight away.

Thank you. Godspeed. #artemisii

People complain about Facebook and Twitter as being full of disinfo and crap. But lordy, LinkedIn is giving them a run for their money.

I know we live in an era of realpolitik, but I wish people would just say the truth straight up, and damn the torpedoes.

Running hashcat over Newfoundland like a totally normal person

Jeg tror jeg må være den eneste på planeten som synes at Ryan Gosling ikke er noen stor karakterskuespiller.

I've started dumping Quantickle graphs on this repo. First out Sidewinder. There'll be more to come. github.com/RSAC-Labs/Qu...

Quantickle-Graphs/Cybersecurity/cases/sidewinder at main · RSAC-Labs/Quantickle-Graphs

Contribute to RSAC-Labs/Quantickle-Graphs development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Anyone left out there who used to work with the old Symantec Antivirus for Macintosh series of products? Love to chat.

Not well known, but after Hypercard was released for Macs, people made viruses for it. One such was "Wormcode", but no sample could be found. However, Wikipedia says: Originally posted to the usenet group comp.sys.mac.hypercard" in a stack called "Font Preview". And what do you know.

There are stories about a program - The Cookie Monster - at MIT/Brown in the 70's that would annoy users by asking for cookies all the time. Some have called it an urban legend. Not so much. The original CM was written in PL/1 for Multics and can be found here: www.multicians.org/pg/cookie.pl1

If you are a veteran of infosec/malware scene in the 70-90'ies you may receive a cold mail/message from me asking if you have historical material. Sorry about being such a pest. Just pipe to dev\null if not interested. There will be only one ping, hopefully it should be manageable.

In the 80-90'es Japan also struggled with DOS viruses - but with a twist. Their market was dominated by NEC PC-98 computers. They ran a DOS port on 8086 but BIOS was different, and disk IO was not via INT 13h but INT 1Bh. Thus Japanese boot viruses had to be custom made, like NEC/Hallow.

Almost every operating system has malware of some kind. Heard about MenuetOS? Small hobbyist OS project. Yet, there's at least two viruses for it (by the same person)

After prowling old USENET postings I found two more VM/CMS CHRISTMAS EXEC copycats. One minor variant of the original, and another called "ICM EXEC" from March '94. github.com/SnorreFagerl...

In 1987, a year before the Morris worm, the CHRISTMAS EXEC worm spread over email on EARN, BITNET and VNET. It's well documented. Did you know that several copycats followed on BITNET - at least 10 variants? Three of them - FACES, RAMA and ZT are uploaded to VHP. Below: RAMA aka Happy Ramadan.

I just received a fantastic donation of historical material for the Virus History Project. It will take some time to catalogue, but there's stuff in here that I have never seen - like three CHRISTMA EXEC-like worms for VM/CMS.

This is going to be unpopular, but I think it's the truth. Just poked around at one of the AI-music generation services. The kids are taking to this as fish to water, generating, sampling, remixing. The quality of much of this is *really high*, any genre. Not slop. These are the new playlists.

The DECNET Father Christmas worm of '88 hit (and notified its creator about) 35 out of >2500 NASA SPAN nodes. It's likely a coincidence, but one of them was OCEAN1 (node 6.58) - the box next to DIATOM (node 6.59) that was used as drop for the WANK worms the year after.

One WANK worm is likely lost, but I have to try: From the Dreyfus book: "Underground" ... but the Easynet version ... was ... distinct. It had a strange line of code in it, *a line missing from any other versions*....no circumstances was it to attack computers inside DEC's area 48. Anyone seen it?

I'm interested in getting in touch with anyone who was involved in the WANK/OILZ worm outbreak at NASA/CERN/DoE in 1989. I've talked to a few folks, but there are still blanks in this story - if you were part of that please ping me.

I hate the Word spell checker the most out of all modern application features. This condescending, unimaginative, language-averaging automat has caused more damage to writing than anything else up to the AI era.

@fuzzface.epsilon-ix.masto.host.ap.brid.gy btw: As I understand it you were integral in the WANK cleanup. Did you ever see the successor - OILZ?