Thank you, California government employee, for the cool e-mail and cool pictures

me explaining to my kids what it was like using dial up internet

Hello,

Our backend is currently down because we're migrating hosts. Our frontend is still up, hence why you can see the "BBIAB" message.

tl;dr used too much data, moving to dedi

non-tl;dr (long read)

We initially used Wasabi as our backend because it's cheaper than a lot of hosting providers. Wasabi is good if you have data stored, but you don't intend on your egress exceeding what is currently being stored. Your egress exceeding what is stored is a violation of Wasabi terms-of-service specifically in their data usage section.

Under normal conditions, due to our Cloudflare enterprise which was gifted to us from Cloudflare, we would not exceed our data storage in egress and everything would be fine and dandy. However, as we've begun aggregating malware for our virus exchange domain, we've begun consuming egress and data usage at a high rate. Our current flow works something like this:

1. Get file (malware malware, maybe not malware)
2. Submit to virus exchange database via API
3. Data goes inside virus exchange database
4. Data sent to VirusTotal for scanning
5. Wait 60 seconds (async, other files sent too)
6. Query VirusTotal results
7. If file is malware, store in database as SHA256
8. If not malware, dispose of file
9. Copy confirmed malware from virus exchange bucket to vx-underground malware ingestion bucket
10. File placed in daily ingestion queue data directory

Each day every malicious file received is thrown in a directory labeled the current date — usually named something like "Malware.{Year}.{Month}.{Date}". We eventually pull these directories down from our bucket using the AWS CLI and 7z ultra compress them. Once we 7z ultra compress them we move them to local backup instances. Once backup is completed we push it back to the vx-underground backend prod environment.

We began receiving warnings from Wasabi when we were ingesting 50,000 - 100,000 malware samples a day. We scaled it back to 15,000 - 30,000 malware samples a day. This still irritated them, so we now have to move to a new host who won't charged us a fortune for processing and moving so much data internally and externally.

We ultimately decided to move to TorGuard because they're a sponsor of ours, we have a good relationship with them and their team, and they're going to help us out with some malware-related stuff. We had planned on eventually moving to their infrastructure for awhile but we kept delaying it because moving so much data, modifying so much of our internal procedures, and laziness, made us dread the move.

It's wonderful seeing people produce creative educational content.

Thank you, endingwithali for highlighting this exceptionally talented programmer and their unique educational courses

Had to censor the image though because of all the peepees, butts, and boobies

> get letter in the mail
> from health insurance place
> oh_no.png
> open mail
> health insurance company says data was in a security breach

oh thank god, was worried it was something important

This is the United States of Ameriburger, was worried the health insurance company was going to charge me $45,000 for that time I visited my doctor for a check-up

All services will be restored on Wednesday.

Thank god, we're bored as hell

Top free apps right now in the United States on the Google Play Store

Chat, we are cooked (Lemon8 is owned by TikTok)

new year, new me

try writing a keylogger on windows that doesn't use if-else statements, while loops, for loops, do while, etc. switch statements also arent allowed

In 2024 we didn't:

- Get any certificates
- Complete any college courses
- Get featured in documentaries
- Win awards

Actually, we haven't gotten any of these in years.... :(

It's okay, mysterious husband described on LinkedIn, we're bums too and also collect cat pictures

> have coding project idea
> complete it
> unhappy

guess ill just introduce unnecessary amounts of convolution into the code, make it basically unreadable to myself and others, and then forget how it works in a few weeks

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

A long time ago I wrote code that would use callbacks to determine when a USB device with a valid filesystem was inserted.

If it did, it would copy itself to it.

tl;dr the malware is coming from the machine!!111

https://pastebin.com/raw/sVyz1Nsk

Stacey makes a great point.

Last weekend at a family gathering I sat across the dining room table from my 16 month old nephew.

I had multiple clear-cut career accomplishments in 2024. My 16 month old nephew? Zero.

He can't code
He can't drive
He poops his pants
He hasn't even tried to enroll in any formal higher education institutes

"How do you *do* that?!" I asked in shock. I asked, "how do you do nothing all day except go poo poo pee pee in your pants? You can't even code in PYTHON!"

He pooped his pants in response.

New infrastructure is up.

Papers have been migrated. Tomorrow, whenever we get to it, the site will be restored to show stuff we've migrated.

It's going to take some time to move the malware samples (it's big). Once that's done we'll restore the VXDB and then move back to kitty cat collections.