malwaretech

malwaretech, 6 months ago to random

Twitter quietly dropped the government identity check requirement for verification, as well as the requirements that the account be 30 days old, have an avatar, and are not impersonating anyone.

I was able to get verification on a 2 day old account named Barack Obama with no avatar or posts.

malwaretech, 6 months ago to random

This will basically be the first US election where disinformation operatives have control over a major social media platform, rather than having to subvert its trust and safety apparatus.

malwaretech, 7 months ago to random

After everything that's happened, Meta quietly decided in 2022 that they're going to return to allowing political ads that claim the 2020 election was rigged 🥴​
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/15/facebook-ads-2020-election-rigged-stolen-instagram-policy

malwaretech, 7 months ago to random

Today is the last day of cybersecurity awareness month. I look forwards to going back to being unaware of cybersecurity tomorrow.

malwaretech, 8 months ago to random

I keep seeing this get reposted and I can't tell if people are trolling for engagements or if everyone is just completely financially illiterate. If you get any answer other than $400, you need to go back to school.

malwaretech, 8 months ago to random

I made a new Twitter account just to make sure my disinformation research account wasn't somehow tainted by my scrolling habits. Here is the makeup of my news feed from a brand new account:

Elon Musk - Far right troll
Spectator Index - Neutral, high quality news
OSINTdefender - Disinformation account, possibly a RU bot
Disclose.tv - Far right news outlet
Matt Wallace - Far right troll
Scott Adams - Far right troll / Conspiracy account
Illuminati Bot - Far right troll / Conspiracy account
Hurt Copain - Left Wing, I think?
Catturd - Far right troll
Tim Pool - Far right troll
Gunther Eagleman - Far right troll
Chaya Raichik - Far right troll
Ian Miles Cheong - Far right troll
Nick Sortor - Far right troll

malwaretech, 8 months ago to random

I'm always shocked by how expensive basic European experiences are in the US. One of my favorite things is high street shops. You have a bunch of stores with apartments above them, so you can always live within walking distance of basically everything. In the US they separate things into commercial and residential districts so you have to drive everywhere.

Areas that allow mixing residential and commercial buildings are so rare that supply & demand sends costs through the roof. In Europe living in an apartment above stores is a budget option for people who can't afford homes, in the US you basically have to be wealthy and often those apartments cost as much as an entire house.

malwaretech, 8 months ago to random

"It'd be cool to get a house here"
checks mortgage prices
"Hmm, $16,000/month. I think I'll buy a nice tent"

malwaretech, 8 months ago to random

FML, It looks like the Airline Pilots Union is going to force the FFA to close the charter loophole because it's taking business away from major airlines. The loophole allows carriers running planes with 30 seats or less to operate like private jets and not force passengers to go through security. It was the last remaining not completely garbage experience of commercial air travel.
https://simpleflying.com/faa-close-regulatory-charter-loophole/

malwaretech, 8 months ago to random

Oh no, the techbros are becoming self aware 🫣

malwaretech, 8 months ago to random

Certainly explains why his brain is mostly soup at this point.

The algorithm pushing a conspiracy theory with over 4000 retweets from verified account "Illuminatibot" claiming Bill Gates received secret funding from Germany to depopulate the country.

malwaretech, 9 months ago to random

Got a question because I'm useless at business. I get a lot of emails from companies asking me to do webinars, interviews, be a podcast guest, etc. They never mention any payment (not just no payment amount, but no mention of it being paid at all). Then when I don't reply, they follow up later with "btw we can pay you" and it's always phrased like they simply forgot to mention that in the initial email. I understand me being responsible for negotiating my rate, but having to negotiate getting paid at all? Is this the norm or is this just unserious companies trying to see first if I'll work for free and I'm better to just not engage at all with them at all?

malwaretech, 9 months ago to random

Very excited to find out if congress is going to be just regular useless, or useless so hard they shut down the entire government.

malwaretech, 9 months ago to random

I just saw that Am I The Asshole reddit thread where the white girl started going to a black salon because she had extremely curly hair and the black salon was the only one that didn't massacre it. Her white friends straight up gaslit her into believe she was engaging in cultural appropriation and stealing resources from black people. WILD 💀​

malwaretech, 9 months ago to random

I guess the economy really isn't going well because my apartment complex just sent out an email advertising a service that provides financing for paying your monthly rent

malwaretech, 9 months ago to random

Between the collapse of the advertiser model, record high interest rates, and generative AI content farming, the next decade isn't looking great for the free and open internet.

malwaretech, 9 months ago to random

I'm a big fan of social media platforms that let you delete comments on your own posts. I get so many where people are going out of their way to call me out for something that was neither said, implied, or even existed in the near vicinity of my post. It's just like "nah, ur comment priveledged are revoked. Come back when you've worked out some issues lol"

malwaretech, 9 months ago to random

I do wonder how many people are staying on Twitter due to follower count alone. Having had an account for over a decade, I'd have previously estimated about 20% of my followers were dead accounts. Based on now leaving and making new accounts on other platforms, my estimate is closer to 90%.

As a blogger I've always known only like 1% of people who retweet/like a post actually clicked the link and read the article, but I assumed that was just a social media thing. Having experimented with basically every other platform, I learned it's more likely that a significant number of Twitter engagements are fake, and those that aren't don't really care enough to read your work, they'll just give you a retweet/like for appearances.

malwaretech, 9 months ago to random

I'm living the free-market libertarian dream right now. Some random no-name ISP has negotiated an exclusive deal with my apartment complex, so they've cut off all other service and forced everyone to pay for the same garbage internet.

malwaretech, 9 months ago to random

Twitter made a new ad for the platform that features a phone scrolling through Twitter. They ended up pulling it and remaking it after people noticed it contained a tweet mocking Elon for trying to blame Twitter's advertiser exodus on the jews. The second version of the ad, which is still online, contains a tweet about creampieing a rotisserie chicken.

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malwaretech, 9 months ago to random

It might Be Time to Rethink Phishing Awareness

https://malwaretech.com/2023/09/it-might-be-time-to-rethink-phishing-awareness.html
#cybersecurity #cybersecurityawareness #phishing

malwaretech, 9 months ago to random

An interesting fact I learned is that internal combustion engines are so inefficient that you could charge an average electric vehicle using a coal powerplant, and even with all the energy lost to transformers, power lines, charging, etc, it'd still be more efficient than an average gas powered car, even if you ignore the entire petroleum refinement and distribution process.

malwaretech, 9 months ago to random

My favorite quantum physics explanations was from someone who responded to the question "what is electron spin" with "Imagine a ball and it's spinning, except its not a ball and its not spinning". It seems like a shitpost, but pretty much sums up all of quantum physics philosophy.

jerry, 9 months ago to random

More bad news...

malwaretech, 9 months ago to random

Honestly, the idea that protecting hate speech increases freedom needs to die already.

https://throwawayopinions.io/the-american-illusion-of-free-speech.html?1

malwaretech, 9 months ago to random

Trying to figure out if Mark Zuckerberg hired a PR person to run his socials or if he's genuinely funny

jerry, 9 months ago to random

One of the backlog items we all took on during the pandemic was replacing the saying “avoid it like the plague” with something more reflective of modern day views on such things.

malwaretech, 9 months ago to random

FML. My apartment management just showed up to install the new internet package, which sounded pretty good (Symmetrical Gbit). Dude comes in to set it up and is trying to install a wifi access point behind my couch. I told him I don't need an access point because I have my own mesh network, I just need to connect the new modem to my network rack. He starts trying to explain that the internet doesn't require a modem, so I'm like confused af.

After like 10 minutes of trying to figure out wtf this guy is talking about, I realized they've installed an apartment complex wide wifi mesh network, so there is no individual internet packages anymore. Everyone in the entire apartment complex is just connected to one big wifi network. They claim all the users are segmented by VLAN, but I genuinely don't think I've ever wanted something less in my life.

malwaretech, 9 months ago to random

The LinkedIn meta of creating fake Tweets from yourself, photoshopping in a verified badge, then quoting yourself by posting screenshots makes me want to kms.

I genuinely did not think it was possible to be more cringe than chronically online Twitter users until I learned about LinkeInfluencers.

malwaretech, 9 months ago to random

Translations: "our ad business is dying so we're forcing you to put more and unskippable ads on your videos so we can boost our earnings for the quarterly report"

malwaretech, 9 months ago to random

The only ads I get on LinkedIn are propaganda from oil companies trying to prevent combatting climate change. Great job, Microsoft 🫠

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briankrebs, 9 months ago to random

I suppose it's not rocket surgery to figure out which is the real me here. How/should one report these kinds of things for investigation? I never much cared on Twitter about imposters because reporting them never did anything. These are all using my Twitter photo for profile pics.

malwaretech, 9 months ago to random

Outsourcing US defense capabilities to any corporation has always been a national security trade-off, but SpaceX specifically is a private company where a single extremely unhinged pro-Russia troll controls more voting shares than the entire rest of the shareholders combined. Anyone who doesn't see the national security issue with putting a nation's defense capabilities in the hands of a Wish.com Lex Luthor knock-off has actual soup for a brain.

https://infosec.exchange/@[email protected]/111024207167342302

malwaretech, 9 months ago to random

This is absolutely crazy stuff. Chinese hackers were able to get into a bunch of government email accounts by forging Microsoft access tokens, but how it happened is wild.

Apparently an internal Microsoft system responsible for signing consumer access tokens crashed, then a bug in the crash dump generator caused the secret key to be written to the crash dump. Microsoft's secondary system for detecting sensitive data in crash dumps also failed, allowing the crash dump to be moved from an isolated network to the corporate one. The Chinese hackers compromised a Microsoft engineer's account and were able to get a hold of the crash dump. They were not only able to find the key and figure out that it's responsible for signing consumer access tokens, but were also able to exploit a software bug to use it to sign enterprise access tokens too, basically giving them the keys to the kingdom.

So many security system had to fail for this to happen. Either the hackers were very lucky or extremely patient.

https://msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2023/09/results-of-major-technical-investigations-for-storm-0558-key-acquisition/

malwaretech, 9 months ago to random

For anyone unaware, Google Chrome is currently rolling out an update that track your interests based on browsing history, then share them with 3rd party websites. The notification page makes it sound like they added a new privacy feature, but in actuality they automatically enrolled you into their tracking system and you have to go and manually opt out.

malwaretech, 9 months ago to random

Something I'd never seen before but isn't super uncommon in SoCal is this plankton that glows neon blue when disturbed. It causes the ocean to glow in the dark and is completely safe to swim in.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cwp7CpjJhey/

malwaretech, 9 months ago to random

Also, FWIW, things makes a lot more sense when you stop looking at police as the solution to crime and start looking at them as the solution to rehabilitating individual criminals. If you want to address the problem you have to address the underlying societal causes. Not a single police officer I've spoken to even think that playing whack-a-mole with criminals is going to solve crime. ISPs censoring Nazi websites do far more to protect society than infinite policing (especially when being a nazi isn't even illegal). If you're going to knock the censorship, then pitch a better solution than "more cops lol".

malwaretech, 9 months ago to random

This article from the EFF seems naive at best. They argue that Tier 1 ISPs should not police speech, which is fair, but their proposed solution is to just let hate sites sit around and radicalize people, then have the law deal with the few who cross the line between protected speech and criminal harassment.

Below is an extensive list of all the times 'just throw more cops at the problem' has solved anything:

1. literally not once ever.
2. See 1.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/isps-should-not-police-online-speech-no-matter-how-awful-it

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