• @[email protected]
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    16910 months ago

    “the malware is written in the Visual Basic Scripting language.” is where I stopped 😹 lol at least we know the Russians are suffering.

    • @[email protected]
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      9310 months ago

      This is like when I assumed my high school IT department was so good that I’d never be able to get past their content restrictions, but then renaming Halo CE to “explorer.exe” let me play all the games I wanted.

      • @[email protected]
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        910 months ago

        I had FF3 broken up into a few files and renamed and disbursed through the school network so I’d just pull them all into a local file at the computer I was working at in the lab and play during class. I thought I was the shit.

    • El Barto
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      1010 months ago

      Are they? Because if the worm is successfully spreading… 🤷

      It’s funny, though…

    • @thesmokingman
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      -1010 months ago

      I’m not following. VBScript seems like the right tool. Why would they use something else? They’re generally light years beyond US defense capabilities so there’s a real dearth of suffering on their side.

      Now if the joke is that they’re suffering because they have to use VBScript, I can get behind that

      • @[email protected]
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        1910 months ago

        WScript.Echo “Just saying if I was invited onto a team intent on wreaking havoc upon our enemies, I would probably quit after 100 lines of calling windows apis in VBScript” & vbNewLine

        • @thesmokingman
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          310 months ago

          tbh I think VBScript is more pleasant to write than C in many cases

          • @[email protected]
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            510 months ago

            Nothing wrong with that! VB isn’t fundamentally bad, I’m just accustomed to C family langs

  • TWeaK
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    3110 months ago

    Meanwhile if you load Baofeng software from a few years ago antivirus software today will ping out. It never used to ping out, such is the nature of zero days.

    Meanwhile Israel has been selling weapons grade hacking technology for decades, they’ve been directly linked to the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi as well as the Mexican cartels.

    Meanwhile Argentina happens to be the hub for zero day exploits, with a bunch of hackers inventing their own shit and selling directly to state actors or whoever will pay.


    The only way you can remain secure is to regularly install a fresh OS. Change my mind.

    • @[email protected]
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      4910 months ago

      The only way to be truly secure is to throw your computer into the sea and return, naked and fearless, into the forest from whence we came.

    • @[email protected]
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      3110 months ago

      Change my mind.

      Sure. Even regularly installing a new OS doesn’t necessarily keep you secure if someone wanted to discreetly install malware on your device. In addition to firmware-level rootkits that re-install themselves on fresh OSs (even platform-agnostic ones), it’s possible that someone might interdict whatever hardware is bought and implant it with additional small hardware that compromises it in some way.

    • Pons_Aelius
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      1410 months ago

      Change my mind.

      In the end, if you are not of interest to a nation state hacker (or a member of a drug cartel) you have nothing to fear from the things you listed.

      But that won;t change your mind.

      • @thesmokingman
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        710 months ago

        Your incorrect assumption is that only cartels and nation states are using said software. Weaponized versions of this stuff are making their way to consumer levels where you just need to piss off the wrong person online. I don’t worry about the US government targeting me beyond normal levels; I worry about employers deploying spyware.

        • Pons_Aelius
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          -310 months ago

          I worry about employers deploying spyware.

          If you are using their equipment, it is not spyware and you should expect to be under surveillance when using it.

          If you are allowing them to install shit on your devices, the fault is all yours.

          • @thesmokingman
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            310 months ago

            Once again, you’re making incorrect assumptions. My concern is employers using the spyware we’re talking about without consent on devices they don’t control. Take a minute to think through before responding. Why would I be worried about either of the two things you mentioned?

    • @thesmokingman
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      510 months ago

      Unless you’re rotating accounts and not posting anything on the internet ever, going so far as to use an in-memory OS like Tails won’t protect you.

    • @[email protected]
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      3410 months ago

      It absolutely works. My company spends a ton of time and resources in an attempt to prevent folks from plugging in random USB drives. Classes to user restrictions. Amazing how some folk are.

      • nakal
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        1010 months ago

        Of course, but OP wanted to implicate that this worm stays local in a network. You need an USB stick to carry it over.

        • @[email protected]
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          1110 months ago

          I’m pretty sure the word you want is “imply.” Although what the Russians are doing with corrupt USBs is a crime, OP isn’t implicated in it.

        • @[email protected]
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          210 months ago

          This is just about right :
          in fact I wanted to know how we are exposed (or not exposed) to this. …to know what we have to do to limit exposure.

  • TWeaK
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    1010 months ago

    Also, would this be the same group that hacked the Socchi Winter Olympics, soon after Russia was banned? The one that the US indicted and labelled as a “petulant child”?

        • @thesmokingman
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          310 months ago

          Correct. That’s what I called out with my second link. Your question was whether Gamaredon did Olympic Destroyer.

          • TWeaK
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            310 months ago

            Ah I get what you’re saying. Would be more helpful if lemmy presented more than one comment in context when replying.

            • @thesmokingman
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              310 months ago

              I thought it was a really valuable question! There are several Russian APTs and you made me question my understanding of the attack. I had to reread some stuff to make sure I could answer you properly.

              • TWeaK
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                210 months ago

                I mean I was mainly joking and shoehorning in another story I knew a bit more about, but thank you for the other links for me to read :)

  • AutoTL;DRB
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    610 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    A group of Russian-state hackers known for almost exclusively targeting Ukranian entities has branched out in recent months either accidentally or purposely by allowing USB-based espionage malware to infect a variety of organizations in other countries.

    “Gamaredon continues to focus on [a] wide variety [of] Ukrainian targets, but due to the nature of the USB worm, we see indications of possible infection in various countries like USA, Vietnam, Chile, Poland and Germany,” Check Point researchers reported recently.

    The image above, tracking submissions of LitterDrifter to the Alphabet-owned VirusTotal service, indicates that the Gamaredon malware may be infecting targets well outside the borders of Ukraine.

    The data suggests that the number of infections in the US, Vietnam, Chile, Poland, and Germany combined may be roughly half of those hitting organizations inside Ukraine.

    The core essence of the Spreader module lies in recursively accessing subfolders in each drive and creating LNK decoy shortcuts, alongside a hidden copy of the “trash.dll” file.

    “Comprised of two primary components—-a spreading module and a C2 module—it’s clear that LitterDrifter was designed to support a large-scale collection operation,” Check Point researchers wrote.


    The original article contains 744 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

        • @[email protected]
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          010 months ago

          Nice joke 😋🤣 ! with the Macintosh. (since it is Windows, yes, you are protected).

          … read it yesterday and today again and only now I got it. Well, I am quite slow on the uptake for jokes 😆.