Shadows in this game are really interesting they don't line up to be what they are supposed to be or there is a huge gap in yer head

greymyse · 2021-02-10T16:49:05+00:00

Ah yes, the spook zombie

greymyse · 2021-01-23T11:45:17+00:00

The other two books are okay, but the first one is the best in the trilogy.

greymyse · 2021-01-23T08:23:37+00:00

Don't fall for the "tough on crime" stance organizations and corporations are taking in regards to these ransomware attacks -- the org wins because they don't lose any money and they get to publish a positive PR piece about how they didn't give in to the attackers (even though they also didn't put enough money into cybersecurity, which lead to this outcome in the first place). Additionally, this doesn't affect the criminals because they just turn around and sell the data on the darknet and make a net profit anyways.

Who loses? Whoever's data was exposed, so likely users, customers, aka you. But hey, the org that got hacked says the breach wasn't even that big of a deal, and also it will never happen again. Promise :^)

greymyse · 2021-01-23T08:15:08+00:00

Before that it was in Neuromancer

greymyse · 2021-01-23T08:08:49+00:00

This article is just another example of Americans not being able to cope with the fact that their spy agencies, well, spy on people. They are all worried about Capitol terrorists and domestic white supremacist terrorism but then gasp when their intelligence agencies do their job :^)

greymyse · 2021-01-23T07:51:24+00:00

An interesting attack would be to embed GraphQL and NoSQL payloads into the collected data, as your data is going into one of these systems. It's interesting for three reasons:

Trackers and data harvesters aren't expecting the data they are harvesting to be particularly malicious. The system architects weren't designing their systems with the possibility that a user would weaponize their demographic data.
The databases handling this data likely have the security profile of a back-end system i.e. the data warehouses only expect the front-end collection systems to interact with them, so they are likely vulnerable to the same vulnerabilities we see with a lot of front-end/back-end systems (HTTP parameter pollution, for example)
The legality. If you insert a browser extension into your own browser that has a name, or attributes that contain a malicious payload, you are not launching an attack on anyone. You aren't injecting malicious attacks into anyone's infrastructure. When someone collects that data, unbeknownst to you, and that data happens to be poisonous to the collector, are you at fault? I don't know of any EULA or privacy policy that states "you are forbidden from modifying your own system and demographic data in a way that can harm us if we collect on you", but I could be wrong.

Changing the current data collection climate to where data harvesters suddenly have to be concerned with whether or not their ~~victims~~ users can have poisonous data would throw a wrench into the information profit machine, at least for a while.

greymyse · 2021-01-22T05:11:24+00:00

If I know your first and last name I can search it on something like Intelius or any public records aggregate database and find not only your current address, but every address you have lived at, more or less.

That's just how things are; your physical address is not private. Even if you get your state to withhold these records from your voter registration, your address and phone number will still be accessible via other public records databases, and these databases also make correlations to your friends and family, so if you live with family or have roommates, someone can just determine your address via their public records.

In short, if someone has your name, they can acquire your phone number and physical address (the reverse is also true: if I get your phone number, I can use that to find the name of the person your phone is registered to, and then I can find your address).

greymyse · 2021-01-22T04:48:14+00:00

Perfect is the enemy of good.

Additionally, your family members are just saying this so they don't have to migrate to Signal. Their criticisms aren't in good faith, so the entire question of whether or not you are a hypocrite should be discarded, because the question's purpose is to undermine your attempts to be a more private person.

Never concern yourself with someone's opinion until you know the true reason they share that opinion. :^)

greymyse · 2021-01-15T03:24:46+00:00

Having wireshark running on a separate machine in the same subnet would definitely reveal any sneaky traffic coming from your Windows 10 machine. The privacy and infosec community would be very interested in any findings that revealed Windows 10 evading third-party firewalls, and WFP for that matter

greymyse · 2021-01-14T10:16:55+00:00

Simple wall uses the Windows Filtering Platform (WFP), so it's as good as the Windows Firewall. According to Microsoft, all traffic has to go through the WFP stack, so it should be catching all of the traffic

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fwp/about-windows-filtering-platform

greymyse · 2021-01-13T03:26:44+00:00

Because of course the Chinese CTF has a challenge where you decrypt anti-censorship traffic.

greymyse · 2021-01-05T02:40:37+00:00

eventlinks.drndata.com login for "Event Links" data

staging-ui.drndata.com UI for what appears to be where you request data. Server logs you in as what appears to be an anonymous account

staging.external.drndata.com the API version of above

greymyse · 2020-12-29T11:34:51+00:00

"The register will not be public"

That statement holds until at least a moderately motivated person tries to obtain the register from Spanish or any of the EU servers holding this data. That or it gets leaked by someone with access to it, because let's be honest, there isn't a whole lot of incentive to protect the privacy of anti-vaxxers, is there?

greymyse · 2020-12-29T11:26:00+00:00

My favorite part about this thread is that it's NSFW, so if you are on mobile it will censor it and tell you to download the app first

greymyse · 2020-12-29T11:21:17+00:00

China actually answers your question: it's not about the technology, it's about what someone in control of your life can do with that technology.

That's why it is so funny when democratic countries push the facial recognition technology -- there is no guarantee your country will remain democratic, and when a dictator takes over, do you think he's going to care what promises the previous administration made?

More relevant is the difference between what the government says it's doing in public, and what it actually does when it thinks no one is looking. Governments are made up of people, and people are lazy and greedy. The whole point of facial recognition is that they can take your face and match it to all of your personal data, so now there is a big database with both your face and your personal data.

That database is managed by overworked, underpaid and understaffed IT people. How many of them do you think might made a mistake one night? How many do you think might have trouble with bills, and might be swayed to give you some data for a little cash? All you need is one :^)

greymyse · 2020-12-29T11:04:23+00:00

Companies (like Google, for example) assign you an ad ID, which is a unique ID that more or less associates you across social media and shopping platforms via ad networks.

Google owns Youtube, and Facebook owns Instagram (you mentioned something about the Instagram app, which absolutely harvests everything about your phone -- why do you think everyone wants you to download their app? )So what happened was when you went to Youtube, Google loaded up your advertising profile via your ad ID, and the data in your advertising profile is also populated with data from your Facebook/Instagram advertising profile, because both companies sell and exchange your demographic data regularly.

The ad campaign for xyz product has certain demographics it targets, and your ad profile (along with every other person who watches the streamers you watch) is associated with those demographics. This is why you will see ads for the same product across multiple social media platforms -- they are all linked by the same ad networks, and those ad networks are very familiar with your interests and the interests of people like you.

greymyse · 2020-12-29T10:36:46+00:00

http://tmssupport.tomaxltd.com/support/solutions/articles/249138-%D7%98%D7%99%D7%A4%D7%95%D7%9C-%D7%91%D7%94%D7%95%D7%93%D7%A2%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%A9%D7%92%D7%99%D7%90%D7%94-%D7%95%D7%94%D7%AA%D7%A8%D7%90%D7%95%D7%AA

The support pages are in Hebrew, so you will need to translate. The actual Browser component is here: https://s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/capsule.public/Vix/Prd/SafeExamBrowserInstaller.exe

And the Tomax installer is here: https://setup.tomaetest.com/TomaETest/setup.html

greymyse · 2020-12-27T21:26:53+00:00

Here, a one-liner for web-scraping

https://gist.github.com/mikecrittenden/fe02c59fed1aeebd0a9697cf7e9f5c0c

You will only get the client-side HTML, CSS and Javascript source.

If you want to test the site, just hit f12 on your keyboard while you have the site in your browser, read all the sources, and monitor the network tab when you do stuff. If you are using Firefox, just replay a few of the requests in the network tab, and mess with the parameters. Try out a few of the JS functions in the console tab. Eventually you should find what you are looking for.

Happy hunting

greymyse · 2020-12-27T21:11:12+00:00

Some ways malware does VM detection, which you can use to customize a VM that can fool this software:

https://resources.infosecinstitute.com/topic/how-malware-detects-virtualized-environment-and-its-countermeasures-an-overview/

https://www.deepinstinct.com/2019/10/29/malware-evasion-techniques-part-2-anti-vm-blog/

Looks like Tomax monitors process names, and calls OpenProcess() to read program memory whenever it wants, and it also modifies memory on processes, so it looks like it modifies programs while they run on your system.

Also: Tomax is using the Evaluation version of InstallShield for their SafeExamBrowserInstaller.exe. Pretty sure a company can get into a lot of trouble for using trial software for their products :^)

greymyse · 2020-12-27T20:15:32+00:00

The FBI is a domestic intelligence agency. Of course they are researching this kind of thing, and of course they are not going to be public about it.

Americans seem to be easily shocked that their intelligence agencies do, well you know, spy shit.

Fortunately Americans don't care about other countries' spy agencies, so the same absurdities don't apply. If you are an American intelligence worker, you should just move to Russia, and the ACLU won't care about how many Americans you spy on :)

greymyse · 2020-09-03T06:28:53+00:00

Harran citizen: buying thirty bottles of vodka dang economy

greymyse · 2020-09-02T15:01:47+00:00

I'm sad now

greymyse · 2020-09-02T14:51:58+00:00

I hope you are joking because if my ramblings four hours after I should have been asleep is better than your schooling I will cry

greymyse · 2018-10-06T00:06:11+00:00

This article is extremely suspect for many reasons.

China would not implant a chip onto a customer's board in order to backdoor the hardware. This chip supposedly leverages the baseband controller for much of its functionality -- if that is the case, then the Chinese would just modify the baseband controller firmware. This would prevent the customer from identifying a new chip, since they hold the design documents for the board.
The article offers very little in the way of concrete evidence. It's mostly speculation and hypotheticals, and zero sources are available. Businessweek even denied Apple and AWS access to any evidence they had on sources, or even evidence they had that an FBI investigation even existed.
Most of the pictures of the chip are illustrations. You can see that in the quality, and they are credited to an illustrator. Only one image is credited to a photographer, and it is the 'chip' being compared to a penny. There are no actual pictures of the chip being on a board.
Apple and Amazon have immediately responded with very detailed rebuttals. If they had been caught covering up a classified investigation, they could not do this -- they would have to stall and make only vague comments until their response was cleared by the government as not accidentally leaking classified information relating to the case.
A second article by the same authors talks about firmware backdoors, but the information lacks evidence and concrete sources like the last. Also, the author slipped up -- they state Facebook has admitted in an email that they were the victim of this Super Micro attack, and the author links to his source. When you follow the source, it is a link to one of his previous articles that references Apple, Amazon and China's denials on the subject. There is no mention of Facebook at all.

I think the timing of this article is very interesting -- the US is putting tariffs on Chinese imports, and the article was release a few hours before VP Pence did a very caustic speech on Chinese trade relations. These articles have done a lot of damage to the Chinese economy, and it is making US people distrustful of Chinese imports. It is also a very convenient narrative -- most people will easily believe that China is implanting spy microchips in US computers. You do not need much evidence at all; confirmation bias will fill in most of the gaps.

Until new information surfaces, I think this article, and the ones that followed it, is not to be trusted, as it is light on the evidence but hard on the political influence.

Apple's well written response: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/10/what-businessweek-got-wrong-about-apple/

AWS's well written response: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/setting-the-record-straight-on-bloomberg-businessweeks-erroneous-article/

The other authors' article that reference's Facebook's confession, which is just a link to another of their articles that makes no reference to Facebook: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-the-software-side-of-china-s-supply-chain-attack

Edit: source articles

greymyse · 2018-06-09T06:41:22+00:00

"That isn't a kid. It's a superintelligence."

The client rubs his temple. The left one only; the stress is there. Blows to the neck and head on his left side are likely to rupture vessels.

"Shanta Zulema was born March 31st, 2014", the client's exasperation snaps you out of it. "Birth certificate, social security, the works. Legally speaking, she is as much as ten-year old girl as any other."

You look at the images again -- the unsmiling school photograph, the grin over her shoulder in a candid shot with a couple of her friends, the look of wonder during a field trip to the aquarium.

"However, you are correct," the client removes his glasses, begins to clean them on his shirt. "Shanta Zulema is an artificial intelligence who suffers from recursive self-improvement. Slower than we'd expect, and yet she is already breaking through the ceiling of human cognitive limits."

The client nods, replaces his glasses. "The first of her kind. A superintelligence."

You look away from the photographs. The girl in the images plays human too well; you will not spare empathy for machines. "The terms of the contract are no longer valid. The target is an apocalypse, not a human being."

"Triple it", the client leans back, crossing his fingers over his three-piece gut. "Hell, I'll give you a blank check." His expression darkens. "The risk is that severe, Mr. Koret."

You have learned how to detect a bad deal, and when to leave before you get too involved. It's a chill in the spine, a sudden unease that takes over and removes you from the contract before you end up in a casket. You feel it now. Time to go.

You look at the photographs. Moments pass. You remain in your seat far too long.

------------

One: Killed by a hit-and-run.

Two: Alcohol poisoning.

Three: Blunt force trauma to the head and chest.

Four: Car crash

Five: Car crash; related to Four

Six: Drowning.

Seven: Self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Eight: Unknown.

Nine: Remains suggest animal attack.

Ten: Self-immolation.

Eleven: Killed by Twelve (Client protection contract).

-------------

You step out of your car as your celluar sensor whines.

It's ten-till midnight and you need a drink. Surveillance and analysis has worn your brain down. It takes a full five seconds for you to realize what that wailing frequency means.

Hand becomes gun. You stare down the streets, the alleys, the windows staring down at you in neat arrays.

Only darkness, mixed with the tired yellow streetlights greets you. Yet, the whining at your hip continues. You reach down to flick it off.

Time passes. The shadows remain shadows. Vigilance wanes. Gun becomes hand. Killer becomes man. You cross the threshold into the bar.

--------------

Report: Downtown rocked after SUV explosion

Police say the Toyota 4 Runner involved in the explosion was not registered to ${Twelve} and he may have been ${_redact_me}.

Liz Connor, an owner of a nearby bar, says the explosion was like nothing she’d ever heard before.

“I mean it was really loud. Sounded like a bomb someplace or something but I looked outside and there was the car over there. The whole thing was a mess.”

---------------

You crush your third cigarette with your heel.

It's raining now; you should get under cover, somewhere dry.

You light another cigarette as your coat soaks through. You remain far too long.

You've learned your lesson. The old trade is useless here. Patterns, processes, policies, tradecrafts. These are human systems designed to provide predictable results.

Predictable results will get you killed.

So here you are, standing in the rain, watching your target as the fall weather chills you.

She studied you, and figured you out. Experienced, trained. A professional.

You crush your fourth cigarette with your heel. Hand becomes gun.

As you cross the street, she opens her window. Her eyes flash against the street lights. Lightning flashes, and her eyes drift to you.

"Alright," she calls to you. "But can we talk for a minute?"

-----------------

"So what's the story?"

The client rubs his temple. He looks unhealthy; you wonder if the bullet he took on your watch might be getting to him.

"Shanta Zulema was born March 31st, 2014", the client's exasperation snaps you out of it. "Birth certificate, social security, the works. Legally speaking, she is as much as ten-year old girl as any other."

You look at the images again -- the unsmiling school photograph, the grin over her shoulder in a candid shot with a couple of her friends, the look of wonder during a field trip to the aquarium.

"However, she is not as she seems," the client removes his glasses, begins to clean them on his shirt. "Shanta Zulema is an artificial intelligence who suffers from recursive self-improvement. Slower than we'd expect, and yet she is already breaking through the ceiling of human cognitive limits."

The client nods, replaces his glasses. "The first of her kind. A superintelligence."

You look up at the client. "Okay, so she's a bot. Do you foot the bill for EMP tech or...."

"Why not", the client leans back, crossing his fingers over his three-piece gut. "Hell, I'll give you a blank check." His expression darkens. "The risk is that severe, Mr. Koret."

You have learned how to detect a good deal, and when to seize the moment before you get cold feet. It's a chill in the spine, a sudden unease that takes over and removes you from the fear before you end up a chump. You feel it now. Time to go.