• 2 Posts
  • 93 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 18th, 2023

help-circle
  • Mikina@programming.devtoProgramming@programming.devMaking malware
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    I can’t recommend Maldev Academy enough. It has been an amazing resource, to get into malware development. Keep in mind, however, that malware development is pretty difficult topic. You will have to eventually use WinAPI and syscalls, so learning about that even outside of malware development will help you a lot.

    For example, try looking into how to execute a shellcode in memory - allocate memory as RWX, copy some data and then execute it. Try executing it in a different process, or in a different thread of another process. That’s the core of malware development you’ll probably eventually have to do anyway. Manually calling syscalls is also a skill that you’ll need, if you want to get into EDR avoidance.

    Also, look into IoCs and what kind of different stuff can be used to detect the malware. Syscall hooks, signatures, AMSI, and syslog are all things that are being watched and analyze to detect malware, and knowing what exactly is your program logging and where is one of the most important and difficult skills you can get.

    There probably are a lot resources for these two skills, and they are an important foundation for malware developemnt, so I’d suggest researching that. You’ll probably not get much from looking at other malware, because it tends to be really low-level, and obfuscated, exactly to avoid the IoCs I’ve mentioned above. Implementing the malware behavior after that is the easier part.

    Another good resource to look into are C2s and communication, for example Mythic C2 has some interresting stuff.

    And I really recommend joining the Bloodhound slack. Throughout my cybersecurity carreer as a Red Teamer, the community has helped me a lot and I’ve learned amazing stuff just by lurking.


  • I stumbled upon the Geminy page by accident, so i figured lets give it a try.

    I asked him in czech if he can also generate pictures. He said sure, and gave me examples about what to ask him.

    So I asked him, again in czech, to generate a cat drinking a beer at a party.

    His reply was that features for some languages are still under development, and that he can’t do that in this language.

    So I asked him in english.

    I can’t create images for you yet, but I can still find images from the web.

    Ok, so I asked if he can find me the picture on the web, then.

    I’m sorry, but I can’t provide images of a cat drinking beer. Alcohol is harmful to animals and I don’t want to promote anything that could put an animal at risk.

    Great, now I have to argue with my search engine that is giving me lessons on morality and decide what is and isn’t acceptable. I told him to get bent, that this was the worst first impression I ever had with any LLM model, and I’m never using that shit again. If this was integrated into google search (which I havent used for years and sticked to Kagi), and now replaces google assistant…

    Good, that’s what people get for sticking with google. It brings me joy to see Google dig it’s own grave with such success.



  • 76% of all respondents are using or are planning to use AI tools in their development process this year, an increase from last year (70%). Many more developers are currently using AI tools this year, too (62% vs. 44%).

    What the fuck. That’s horrifying. I also though that every sensible workplace bans the use of AI.

    A friend was telling me about a discussion between CTO’s at a conference, where they were talking about whether it’s even worth it to hire junior developers anymore, since there’s a high risk of them just being “AI-raised”, without much (or any) experience of coding without AI. And, this survey result… I can see where they are coming from. The future of programming looks pretty bleak - our job will not be replaced. It will just get worse, with good developers being more of a rarity.

    And the amount of people who use vim or neovim as their IDE is surprisingly high. Is it skewed by sysadmins?


  • That’s a good question, and I never through about it like that. I think that the lack of documentation isn’t that much of a problem, rather that the code stands out in the project in that it is complex to understand and requires some more though, effort and imagination to grasp, since it’s generic with lot of interfaces and polymorphism.

    Now, that usually wouldn’t be much of an issue, however - the project is a game we’ve been actively working on in our spare time in a team of 2 programmers for the last 6 years, and we are all fed up with it and just want it to end. Most of the (pretty large by now) codebase is kind of simple - it’s a game code, after all, and since we started it when we were 20, there aren’t many overenginered ideas or systems, but everything is mostly written in the ugly, but simple and direct way, so if we had wanted to change something, we may have had to rewrite a part of it, but it never really needed much effort to understand what’s going on.

    But now I need to change this code, which is one of the only parts that requires some kind of imagination and actually sitting down and trying to understand it, and since my motivation about the project is so low, it’s a pretty large hurdle to cross. One that is also unnecessary, since most of the generalism isn’t needed and will never be used. But since the code is written in such extensible way, it’s hard to just hack up a simple and ugly solution somewhere into it and be done with it, without really figuring out what the hell is going on.

    A documentation wouldn’t help with that - it would still take the same amount of mental effort to be able to work with that code, which we generally lack in the project. I think that if I actually took the time to properly look through the code, figuring out what’s going on wouldn’t be too hard - the naming convention is pretty ok and it’s not that difficult, it just requires some mental effort.

    I’m not trying to make excuses, the code very probably has problems, I’m just trying to better sort my thoughts about why I have so much problems working on it. It probably has more to do with my motivation, rather than the code in itself, and the fact that the complexity here wasn’t required, and is now a needless hurdle that actually hinders progress. Not due to it’s quality, but do to unrelated motivation issues and us having to basically force ourselves to work on and finish the damn project.


  • There’s a piece of code in our hobby game project that I’ve written after attending classes in college about how to write clean and SOLID code. It’s the most overengineered piece of shit I’ve ever written. I’m not saying it’s the fault of the lectures, of course it’s on me being a little bit over zealous, but it does check all the boxes - It’s a simple “show selectable list of stuff”, follows MVC, it’s extensible without rewriting to adittional data-types and formats, extensible view that can show any part of data you need, generic, and in general it could be used anywhere we need, for any kind of data.

    There’s only one place where we need and use such list in our game.

    I needed to rewrite a part of it, since the UI changed drastically, to not need this kind of list, while also adding events into the process. I haven’t seen the code for almost 4 years, and it’s attrocious. Super hard to understand what’s going on, since it’s too generic, interfaces and classes all over the place, and while it probably would be possible to rewrite the views for the new features we need, it’s just so complex that I don’t have the mental capacity to again figure out how it was supposed to work and properly wire it up again.

    I’m not saying it’s fault of the classes, or SOLID. It’s entirely my fault, because the classes inspired and hyped me with ideas about what a clean code should look like, that I didn’t stop and think whether it’s really needed here, and went over-the-top and overengineered the solution. That’s what I’d say is the danger of such Clean Code books and classes - it’s easy to feel clever for making something that passes SOLID to the letter, but extensibility usually comes at a complexity, and it’s super important to stop and think - do I really need it?


  • I can’t decide whether this sentence is a joke or not. It has the same tone that triggers my PTSD from my CS degree classes and I also do recognize some of the terms, but it also sounds like it’s just throwing random science terms around as if you asked a LLM to talk about math.

    I love it.

    Also, it’s apparently also real and correct.


  • I see, stonks are way more bullshit than I thought. Is there anything else you can do with your stock, other than sell it to someone else? I always thought that crypto is such a scam especially because in the end, it has no value in itself, and the only thing you can do with it is sell it to someone else. If noone wants to buy it, well, you are fucked. Does it mean that stocks are exactly the same concept? I always thought it has something to do with the vaule of the company and the profits it earns, but if there is no way how to cash them out other than selling your piece of paper to someone, then it’s really the same? I suppose that unlike crypto, the stock price increases if the company is turning profit, but you still have to find someone to sell it to, right, so the price is increasing only because the demand from people willing to buy it is increasing due to it turning profit, but it’s not really tied to the actual value of the company, so it’s exactly like crypto? Or is the price set by some different mechanism than crypto is - pure demand from people willing to buy?





  • I might be wrong, but from how I understand it it probably wouldn’t help. Kernel drivers have a rigorous QA and cert by Microsoft if you want to get them signed, which is a process that may take a long time - longer than you can afford when pushing updates to AV/EDR to catch emerging threats. What Crowdstrike does to bypass this requirement is that the CS Falcon is just an engine, that loads, interprets and executes code from definition files. The kernel driver code then doesn’t need to change, so no need for new MS cert, and they can just push new definition files. So, they kind of have to deal with unsafe in this case, since you are executing a new code.



  • I still use Parsec for remote, and I don’t have any issue with it, it works great and I like it. However, they also did offer a free SDK (Unity plugin) to integrate remote play into your game natively (just like you can have “Invite to Steam Remote Play” button from Steam SDK), which was exactly what we needed - and Steam Remote was never working without issues for us, in comparison to Parsec which worked amazingly well every time we tried it.

    I found numerous mentions of Parsec SDK and how easy it is to integrate, but after Unity bought it, I couldn’t find it anywhere. Only mention was that if you need it, you should contact them.

    So I did that, mentioning that we are a small team of students working on a offline co-op only 2 player game in our free time, and that since Steam Remote wasn’t working for us and I have great experience with Parsec, I asked what we have to do to get access to the SDK/Unity plugin.

    Unity’s answer? Sure, no problem, they will be happy to give us access, with first step being that we pay them 1 000 000$ for it.

    Like, wtf? Did they even read the email? How out of touch you have to be, to casually ask a small student team to pay 1 000 000$?



  • While I’m not using it, since we started our small-team hobby project in git and moving away from it would be a bother, there is one use-case of SVN that would save us a lot of headaches.

    SVN being centralized means you can lock files. Merging Unity scenes together is really pain, the tooling mostly doesn’t work properly and you have no way how to quickly check that nothing was lost. Usually, with several people working on a scene, it resulted in us having to decide whose work we will scratch and he will do it again, because merging it wouldn’t work properly and you end up in a situation where two people each did hundreds or thousands of changes to a scene, you know that the Unity mergetool is wonky at best, and checking that all of those changes merged properly would take longer and be more error prone than simply copying one persons work over the other.

    We resorted to simply asking in chat if anyone has any uncommited work, but with SVN (or any other centralized VSC, I suppose) we wouldn’t have to bother with that - you simply lock the scene file and be safe.


  • It has been a while since I have to deal with problem complexities in college, is there even class of problems that would require something like this, or is there a proven upper limit/can this be simplified? I don’t think I’ve ever seen O(n!^k) class of problems.

    Hmm, iirc non-deterministic turing machines should be able to solve most problems, but I’m not sure we ever talked about problems that are not NP. Are there such problems? And how is the problem class even called?

    Oh, right, you also have EXP and NEXP. But that’s the highest class on wiki, and I can’t find if it’s proven that it’s enough for all problems. Is there a FACT and NFACT class?


  • Here is a picture, that may help a little bit. The n is input size, and f(n) is how long does the algorithm runs (i.e how many instructions) it takes to calculate it for input for size n, i.e for finding smallest element in an array, n would be the number of elements in the array. g(n) is then the function you have in O, so if you have O(n^2) algorithm, the g(n) = n^2

    Basically, you are looking for how quickly it grows for extreme values of N, while also disregarding constants. The graph representation probably isn’t too useful for figuring the O value, but it can help a little bit with understanding it - you want to find a O function where from one point onward (n0), the f(n) is under the O function all the way into infinity.



  • Exactly this. I only have pretty vague experience with machine learning, since it was one of the other specializations for my Masters than the one I choose, which however means we still shared some basic courses on the topic, and I definitely share his point of view. I’ve been saying basically the same things when talking about AI, albeit not as expressively, but even with basic insight into ML, the whole craze that is happening around it is such bullshit. But, I’m by no means an expert in the field, so I may be wrong, but it’s nice to finally read an article from an “expert” in the field I can agree with. Because so far, the whole “experts talking AI” felt exactly like the COVID situation, with “doctors” talking against vaccines. Their doomsaying opinion simply contradicts even the little knowledge I have in the ML field.