The initial access seems to include an Apache CVE from 2019 and a WordPress plugin CVE from 2017. Honestly, UCSD should write a “thank you” letter to Androxgh0st for highlighting their poor patch management, and only using it for C2 in the process. Rather than as a beachhead into the network for a full-blown ransomware attack.
If your patch management is this bad, you shouldn’t be allowed to put stuff on the internet.
First question which popped into my mind was, “Will they force Defender out as well?”
Or, is Microsoft about to abuse it’s position to stifle competition? Again.
do anticheat count as antivirus?
No. But, from the article:
Microsoft has been speaking with game developers about how to reduce the amount of kernel usage
The CrowdStrike fiasco was finally enough for Microsoft to look at forcing drivers out of the kernel. This is absolutely a good thing and will hopefully lead to a more stable Windows.
Why We’re Opening Betting Sponsorships
Because holy fuck that’s a lot of money.
How We’re Doing It Responsibly
We’'re not. We’re just trying to cash in and pretend we’re not going to take advantage of people with poor impulse control.
While I don’t doubt that Iranian backed groups are more likely to target US based assets, I’ve been reading these reports for the last couple days and the “guidance” coming out of the US Government (USG) has been incredibly lackluster. CISA is basically saying, “use MFA and don’t use default passwords.” No shit, should I also plug in the power cord? It’d be great if some sector of the USG would publish something useful. Like a rundown of TTPs or even IoCs. The USG no doubt has a ton of SIGINT on these groups, and I understand that they can’t share all of it; but, fuck me could you at least put something more useful out than “use MFA”?
If you repeat a lie enough times, eventually you start to believe it. Others might also start believing it. Get enough people fully wrapped up in your lies and now you have a cult. Your cult followers will happily swallow any lie you tell them and defend it, often to the point of torture and death. This is pretty much where we are with MAGA, it’s a cult of personality and it’s followers will happily slurp up anything which dribbles out of Trump.
I’m curious to see if the cult outlives its original prophet. Once Trump kicks it, does the cult undergo a transition to a full blown religion? Or, does it fizzle out without it’s original charismatic leader?
That’s the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. And for as much as it is a foundational document of the US, it’s also not a legal document.
Violence is always a bad option. Sometimes however, it’s the least bad of the bad options. And knowing when that point has been reached is incredibly hard, and often misjudged.
A good reminder that “the cloud” is a fancy way of saying, “someone else’s computer”. If you don’t own the hardware, you don’t own the data on it. This works for large businesses because they have actual contracts and lawyers to get their data back. For everyone else, the EULA amounts to one big “fuck you”.
War is Peace. Freedom is slavery.
And now for your Five Minute Hate.
Not a specific word or phrase, but Google Dorking is useful for limiting down search results. Just the basics of putting things in double quotes (e.g. “Find this exact text”) and negating words/phrases (e.g. -NotThis) can go a long way in refining search results. The “filetype:” modifier is much less useful than it was a decade or two ago, as SEO assholes have gotten wise to it and so include tags to show up on results using it. The “site:” keyword can be really handy, when you are pretty sure what you want is on a specific site/domain. Or, if you are trawling a website for specific information. You can also negate the “site:” keyword. So, you can add something like “-site:expertsexchange.com” to a search and get rid of useless advertising sites.
It’s a good thing the American people would never elect a demented narcissist to the office of The President.
Fuck.
No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it.
While I’m all for fresh ideas, one of the advantages to sticking with well known naming is that folks will often look for those things and might end up missing the community, if the name isn’t obvious and easily searchable. While “LFG” does imply that one is looking for a group, rather than maybe just a single other person, it also has a very long history in gaming and is a well known acronym. I suspect a lot of folks are going to specifically look for that acronym when starting their search. So, I’d argue with sticking with that classic.
That said, it is your community and you should build the identity you want to build. So, don’t let some old curmudgeon like me push you away from doing something that interests you.
I’m willing to withhold judgement. But, Chosen’s website reads like bog standard vulture capital trying to pretend they are not going to ride in and enshitify anything they touch. With lots of broad claims about being “community driven” and AI art. Maybe this will work out; but, I wouldn’t be putting money on it.
That said, I don’t blame Dark0ne for wanting to step back. He’s be running this wonderful site for the community for a long time and deserves the opportunity to go do other things. I wish him the best of luck and I hope that NexusMods survives this transition.
This is just Microsoft engineers acknowledging that Windows 11 is about as welcome as Windows Vista was.
The first issue with running a coin miner is using company resources for your own profit. Your own system, using your own electricity, go for it. Running it on a company owned laptop, while at a company building, burning electricity the company is paying for. Ya, that starts to get uncomfortably close to fraud or theft. There is also that whole, “running unauthorized software on a company system, doing who knows what else in the background.” There is a very real possibility that the coin miner has unknown vulnerabilities which could allow remote code execution; or, just outright be malicious and contain a remote access trojan. Maybe he was smart enough to audit all the code it was using and be very sure that’s not the case. More likely, he just grabbed a random implementation of XMRIG, put his wallet in the config file and ran it. Either way, he also made a point of refusing to remove it, so we escalated up to management. With the recent ransomware outbreak having been in the multi-million dollar (possibly low tens of millions) damage range, refusing to remove unauthorized software went over about as well as a lead balloon. There may have been other factors at play; but, the unauthorized software and being a dick about removing it was what got him out the door.
If you spin it up, fucking own it. When you’re done with it, shut it down. I have long lost count of the number of times I’ve reached out to a team to ask about the coin miner they are running on some random EC2 instance only to find out that some jackass spun it up for a test, gave it a public IP, set the VPC to allow any inbound traffic, installed all kinds of random crap and then never updated it. Nor did it get shutdown when the test ended. So, a year and a half later, when the software was woefully out of date, someone hacked it and spun up a coin miner. Oh, and the jackass who set it up didn’t bother to enable logging or security monitoring. But, they sure as hell needed the ability to spin stuff up on their own. Because working with IT to get it done right would be too hard for their fragile little ego.
You joke, but I’ve actually been responsible for a coder getting shown the door for running a coin miner on his work laptop.
In his defense, cyber security at that company was crap for a long time. After a ransomware outbreak, they started paying attention and brought some folks like myself in to start digging out. This guy missed the easy out of, “hey that’s not mine!” The logs we had were spotty enough that we would have just nuked the laptop and moved on. But no, he had to fight us and insist that he should be allowed to run a coin miner on his work laptop. Management was not amused.
Valheim.
Mistlands - Not because “whaaa, Mistalnds hard”, but because the whole area is built around verticality and the game engine most certainly is not. Combat is Valheim is generally pretty good, but after a reasonable amount of playtime, you will experience the frustration of swinging under/over enemies, because of minor variations in terrain height. Mistlands dials this problem up to 11, with the added bonus of enemies which specifically take advantage of this problem.
The Mistlands also turns exploration into a boring, grindy chore. The shorelines are a nightmare to sail around and even with the wisp, the mist is always too close to deal with said shorelines. So, you’re hoofing it through terrain which is designed to be difficult to navigate and move across. The feather cape helps, a bit. But, you’re still going to spend way too long faffing about, jumping up one side of a ridge and floating down the other, only to find that you’re in a gully with nothing useful and need to jump up the other side. Seeing dungeon entrances at any range is impossible. Enemies regularly pop out of nowhere and you’re forced into dealing with the combat verticality problems.
I’ll also throw a bit of shade at “Refined Eitr” as a resource, though I think the problem is less the resource and more the grind to get the parts for it. To start with, you need to make a Black Forge, to make that you need Black Cores, to get Black Cores, you need to spend hours in the mists hoping to stumble across one or more dungeons to get the cores. And inside the dungeons, expect lots of combat where the verticality problem is on prominent display. Now that you have the Black Table, you get to make the Eitr Refinery, which requires more Black Cores. Hope you enjoyed getting them the first time! Ok great, more cores obtained, time to go stumbling about again looking for Soft Tissue. With any luck, you’ve been mining (or at least marking) nodes along the way. Though, expect to spend more time lost in the Mists, you need a shit ton of Soft Tissue. Thankfully, this is a resource you can take through a portal, so that’s nice.
And finally, you get to raid Dverger towns for a required material to extract sap, a Sap Extractor. “What about trade? Vikings were well know traders”, you ask. Nope, fuck trade, all that gold you’ve been collecting, go spend it on some clothes which you will never actually use. You want a Sap Extractor, put on your killing pants and get raiding. Ok fine, we have our Sap Extractor covered in Dverger gore. And that gets us to the least horrible part of our Refined Eitr. Sap extraction is not terrible, find a spot with several roots in close proximity and just rotate a few extractors through them.
Right let’s get our Eitr Refinery built…and why the fuck is one of the input ports on the top? Ok whatever, I’ll build some stairs and…why the fuck is this thing tossing off damaging sparks? Yes, I know you can wrap it in iron bars, but seriously what the fuck? Why is this even a game mechanic? It’s really the perfect metaphor for all of the Mistlands. It’s needlessly annoying and doesn’t really provide anything positive for gameplay or fun. Just another pointless grind tossed in because, “players like hard things, right?”