tl;dr 1st lesson of cybersecurity, verify your identity to bishopfox without detonating malware on your machine (we failed)

"i work in tech" simulator

A Russian ransomware affiliate we know sent us this video.

Very cool.

Thank you for educating us on your culture. 🙏

Someone sent us an e-mail saying they have some malware samples they can send us.

We eagerly replied and thanked them.

They replied saying the samples "are for sale" and asked how much we'd pay for them.

The current street value of malwares (decent quality) is $1,200 for 7,500,000 malwares.

A curated set of high quality malwares is roughly 15,000 malwares for $3,000.

It's hard to get high quality samples unless you're an AV and/or EDR vendor.

We're finally updating the site this week.

The poop posting will end soon.

Okay we won't stop poopy posting

Here is the process in which we add papers to vx-underground.

1. Find papers (Twitter, blogs, searching online, people sending them to us, etc)
2. Reviewing the paper, ensure it is legitimate, authentic (not copy-paste), and applicable to what we collect
3. Use PrintFriendly to download and transform into readable PDF format
4. Name file appropriately, try to find date of release or approximate date of release, to name it in format such as: "2024-01-05 - Malware Paper Title.pdf"
4.a. If paper contains code or images, place the contents in 7z file that is named after the paper such as: "2024-01-05 - Malware Paper Title.7z". If the content contains an executable file format, password protect the 7z.
5. Take copy, store locally in vx-underground backup NAS
6. Write down new addition in Notepad++ text file to keep track of recent additions (we're ghetto)
7. Once we have a bunch ready to go, push the giant collection of papers to prod.
8. Announce the additions on Twitter and Telegram
9. GOTO 1

We've been doing this cycle, in some form or another, since August 2019. It doesn't sound like much — but as vx-underground grows in size it becomes a lot more painful, tedious, and exhausting.

Hello, how are you?

I spent some time over the weekend just cruising Discord servers, browsing Reddit, and larping as a noob. I was curious what people who are interested in cybersecurity are doing, how they feel about things, the material they're using, etc.

I'm going to give a real hot take, so buckle up.

I strongly dislike a vast majority of information security communities. My entire career (even now) I've been a loner. I don't really feel comfortable in large communities. I don't like seeing, hearing, or reading about people BBQ's, their favorite sports team, their favorite bars, their families, blah blah blah.

People might think this is weird, but I'm not here to make friends. I like malware, and cybersecurity news, but beyond that I'm not interested in anything else. Yes, I can be friendly — I'll gladly talk to anyone. But I'm not going to attend your talk, meetup at a bar, I have absolutely zero interest in playing video games together. Maybe I'm a weirdo, but just because we have something in common (cybersecurity) it doesn't mean we're destined to be best buddies.

If you're interesting in cybersecurity, social networking can help — it can accelerate the job hunting portion, but you 100% do not need to join a community. You do not need to buy a course, you do not need to attend local events, you do not need to attend major conferences.

At the end of the day: if you want a job in cybersecurity you need to read, put in the work, and learn the damn thing. There is no other shortcuts. If you find yourself saying "but there is so many options to learn from!" — that might be you procrastinating.

Anyway, to cool off this hot take, here is a picture of a cat looking at a pile of hot dogs.

Thanks,
- smelly smellington

We were going to edit the meme. Instead of "next gen gaming console" we were going to put something Cybersecurity related. Then we collectively said "Fuck it, I don't give a shit".

(We're v v eepy)

We got that rizz.

Let's skip the small talk, scammer. Let's get to the good part (you trying to give us malware).

Thank you for the meme submission, "ieatass".