Marcus Hutchins :verified:

If you're wondering what it is I do, don't worry, so am I.

Website: https://marcushutchins.com
Security Blog: https://malwaretech.com

Public Key

npub1uu7gddsfwccptfz3wgqqgxz0wuwx302e07k3u475he6qzasfkz4q0hgs7t

NIP-05 Address

malwaretech_at_infosec.exchange@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsww0yxkcyhvvq453ghyqqyrp8hw8rgh4vhltg72l2tuaqpwcymp2smdwc9e

Author Public Key

npub1uu7gddsfwccptfz3wgqqgxz0wuwx302e07k3u475he6qzasfkz4q0hgs7t

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Last Notes

2024-06-18 17:41:42

Saw a dog training video on Instagram titled "how to have good recall with your husk" then the video was just
step 1: get another dog
step 2: tie husky to other dog
Then saw another video where someone had a cattle dog for going and retrieving their husky

2024-06-16 01:32:14

Can we make polished concrete floors illegal? People in LA really be asking for $6.5k/month in rent for their garbage ass warehouse cosplay. If your place has concrete floors and you're asking more than $3k/month in rent, right to jail right away.

2024-06-08 21:29:29

Someone just reminded me of the part of the pandemic where people were sticking keys to their foreheads and convincing themselves the vaccine made them magnetic. Feels like forever ago now

2024-06-08 05:00:49

My Uber Eats guy gave me the wrong order and I didn't even get the consolation prize of some free food to enjoy while I wait. The order I got consists entirely of those energy drinks that have 300mg of caffeine and probably contain radioactive waste

2024-06-07 17:31:29

The thing about LLMs/AI that confuses me so much is how is it that these multi-trillion dollar tech companies can't come up with like a single good use case for their technologies.
If my friend came up to me and pitched me on something like Microsoft Recall, LinkedIn AI post summary, or Instagram Search Chatbot, I'd ask if they were dropped on their head as a child.

2024-06-03 23:00:13

Got asked what the first supply chain attack I came across was, and it reminded me of a funny story from my previous career.
Some time around 2009/2010 someone snuck a backdoor into the source code of UnrealIRCd, which was a super popular IRC server software at the time. I have no idea who backdoored it or why, but we found out about the backdoor before the developers did.
Back then most cybercriminals used IRC as the control protocol for their botnets, so a lot of botnet infrastructure was built on top of UnrealIRCd. We wrote a script to basically crawl DNS blocklists and antivirus blogs for botnet command and control servers, then connect to them and check to see if they're running a backdoored version of UnrealIRCd. When we found botnets using backdoored versions, we'd connect to their server and sit in the control channel and wait for the operator to log on and start issuing commands.
Once we'd figured out what username/hostname the operator uses, as well as the command to download and run code on the infected systems, we'd use the backdoor to edit their IRCd config file and make ourselves admin, then issue a command to all their bots to run our own executable on the infected systems. The code would basically edit the hosts/routes file to redirect their control server domain/ip to our own server, where we'd just collect all the infected systems as trophies. Sometimes the original operator would figure out what happened then connect to our server and rage at us, or pay to have it DDoSed.

2024-05-28 01:50:12

Ok, maybe the TikTok ban was justified actually
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/112/516/201/767/650/749/original/88efd82b1d97c193.png

2024-05-27 01:56:21

- reply

My favorite is hearing "I'm Irish" from someone with a thick southern accent who's never been to Ireland in their life but their great grandmother's dog once met an Irish person

2024-05-27 01:00:57

Am I out of touch with how unhinged British conservatives have become, or does “we promise to draft 18 year olds into the military if you vote for us” seem like a guaranteed way to lose the election?

2024-05-24 15:47:50

I like how the Google CEO is trying to use the excuse that new products always have issues to justify the fact their new AI powered search absolutely sucks, as if they didn't spend over a decade doing the same thing with featured snippets, which also absolutely sucked.

2024-05-21 00:10:22

After posting on LinkedIn about resigning from my job due to burnout, I learned that the most common response to hearing that someone is experiencing burnout is to DM them an ask if they'll contribute their newly acquired free time to your project or organization for free 🥴

2024-05-15 20:03:59

Hypothetically, if you burned out so hard that you quit your job with no backup plan and your options were either look for a new job immediately knowing you're not over the burnout yet, or move somewhere cheap but miserable and take as long as you need, what would you pick?

2024-05-14 20:05:44

Bruh. I just want a nice luxury EV that doesn't fund the world's most obnoxious man baby and his awful social media platform. If you're gonna lock BYD out of the US market, at least ask one of the US manufactures to make some good cars first.
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/112/441/225/524/588/444/original/b0814b44b155a0fb.png

2024-05-11 17:05:01

I’m convinced this is actual footage from the meeting that led to that Clinton interview
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/112/423/540/224/308/818/original/ed524af94d83aa86.mp4

2024-05-11 16:06:52

I'd heard about the price war between BYD and Tesla, but I'd never actually seen any of the BYD cars because they're banned in the US. Some influencer imported one and did a review and now I'm pretty sure the ban is the only thing keeping Tesla alive

2024-05-11 03:40:35

I can see the Northern Lights from Los Angeles lmao

2024-05-10 20:17:16

The latest TikTok drama is absolutely hilarious. Some celebrity went to the Met Gala dressed as Marie Antonette and lip synced “Let Them Eat Cake”, which was a little too on the nose for just about everyone ever, so now they’re getting cancelled so hard that it’s not just them personally being cancelled but celebrities in general. People are just blocking all the celebrities and it’s total chaos

2024-05-07 19:16:49

How do I get into RSA without paying? I know a few years back they had free passes for the expo hall. Method with the least amount of felonies is preferred.

2024-05-07 16:29:59

Booking flights at the airport is such a stress free experience. I just leave my house whenever I feel like it then book the nearest flight when I arrive at the terminal. No stressing about traffic, waking up early, planning my day around travel, or risk of missing my flight. It’s hard for your plan to go wrong if you never had one to begin with.

2024-05-02 20:34:15

Firstly, you don't need to convince me who to vote for, because I legally cannot vote. But here's a different perspective.
The US is not a democracy. There aren't any options in the 2024 Election. There is a single candidate (Biden) or a threat of harm (Trump). Telling people they must vote for Biden no matter what, or they get Trump, is no different than telling them they must vote for Putin or their loved ones could fall out a window.
The 2024 election isn't about saving democracy. Democracy died the second you normalized it not being ok to vote 3rd party, or withhold your vote in protest. When you are going around arguing Biden shouldn't have to earn votes, he must win by default, you've done the one thing Trump could never do: you've killed Democracy.
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/112/373/326/656/045/141/original/046af410a40266f4.png

2024-04-30 16:38:51

I feel semi bad for instantly blocking everyone who replies telling me they followed me for tech and that I need to post more of that, but it's really really obnoxious. This is my personal account, I talk about what I want to talk about. If I have interesting tech stuff I want to talk about, I'll talk about interesting tech stuff. I don't make a single dollar from this platform, so what you're basically saying is that you expect me to spend days researching and creating content tailored to your personal taste, entirely for free.

2024-04-29 20:41:30

Nothing says right side of history quite like telling the International Criminal Court that they can’t indict your buddy for war crimes because it could anger him into doing more war crimes
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/112/356/423/225/685/129/original/bd2f60ab486f0ed9.png

2024-04-24 23:27:23

Got to say, I'm really surprised to hear the take "protesting is bad because it inconveniences people" in my replies on Mastodon of all places, but I guess that's where society is at now

2024-04-24 21:32:40

The university protests are a great example of how constitutional rights don't truly exist. In theory you have the right to free speech and peaceful protest, but only on public property. On private property, the property owner has the right to arbitrarily trespass you at any time and have you arrested, which makes it extremely easy to silence even peaceful protestors. Most large institutions will always align with the government, since it's the government that upholds the system they benefit from. Sure, you can still hold your protests on public property, but since pretty much the only public property available is roads, where you're violating the law by impeding traffic, there is basically nowhere you can actually effectively exercise any of your rights.

2024-04-24 15:46:22

It's a pretty bad time to be a content creator right now. Lost Twitter to Walmart Lex Luthor, lost TikTok to the nursing home for gently alive corpses. Instagram & threads heavily censor news and political content, YouTube is ok but is hard to do without posting long form professionally edited videos that take a lot of resources to create, Mastodon is decent but still fairly small, and BlueSky isn't really functional at all.

2024-04-21 17:56:47

It's wild watching the US completely unravel in real time. Biden was meant to be the safe option, but instead basically just showed everyone how absolutely dead democracy is. People were like "hey, what if we didn't enable all of Gaza to be completely decimated and 10s of thousands of civilians to be killed" and the US government basically went "best I can do is more bombs".

2024-04-19 06:05:50

My neighborhood is so quiet that sometimes I forget I live in the US, but then I just now found out from my neighbors that the road closures a few days ago was due to some dude going on a several hour long shooting rampage where he fired multiple AR15s from an apartment complex roof at passing car, then got in a hour long shootout with police. It didn’t even make national news because his aim was so bad he didn’t manage to hit anyone. Also, for some reason he was offered bail.

2024-04-18 03:51:18

The bane of my existence is I enjoy cooking/preparing food, but only as an occasional thing. I don't want to prepare food on a daily basis, Doordash is obscenely expensive and most of the food is unhealthy, and then those meal prep things that you microwave just taste like sadness. What is an actual good option?

2024-04-15 15:36:58

Someone brought their husky into the cafe and i guess they all just sleep like this 😂
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/112/275/968/807/407/404/original/333d4c2746897fad.png

2024-04-14 03:06:28

My friend left her husky puppy with me for the weekend, so right now I have a baby husky and a teenage one. I don't think anything has ever made me more sure of the fact that I don't want kids. I already have enough work without these things having opposable thumbs.

2024-04-08 23:56:14

Pretty much the only thing that ever makes me feel patriotic is when I have to deal with the government and regardless of if I need a passport, birth certificate, or to pay taxes, I can do it all online from a single portal and then have everything mailed to my foreign address

2024-04-04 21:25:32

AI bros promised so much and all they did was accelerated the enshitification of the entire internet by 100x.

2024-04-01 07:30:05

Microsoft just straight up disabling the entire ZX git repo feels like something that would hinder rather than help.

2024-03-28 05:16:54

I find LinkedIn highly entertaining because there's a bunch of extremely obnoxious people who always go unchecked because everyone is too concerned with trying to come off as professional to call them out, but when you give them back even 1% of the energy the put out, they get super mad.
This morning some dude came into my replies with tons of smoke. I check his profile and it's one of those generic looking preppy white guys that probably got mass produced in a factory somewhere, so I replied saying he looked like he was generated by a primitive AI so that art students would have someone easy to draw, and I get immediately blocked then reported to LinkedIn >_<

2024-03-28 04:41:57

I had this stupid idea to try and cure my dog allergies by just adopting more and more dogs in the hope that my immune system would eventually just give up. We're on day 5 of dogs all day everyday and it's actually worked lmao

2024-03-27 03:52:37

I genuinely don't think the people using LLMs to write posts understand how actually painful they are to read. For me the enjoyment in reading comes from the fact that everyone has their own unique style. Often you catch bits of their personality reflected in the words. LLM output on the other hand, is completely soulless, and half the time reads like a 5th grader trying to meet the word count on their essay.

2024-03-26 19:39:36

Probably the most trouble I ever got in for my financial practices was when I decided to liquidate my crypto portfolio to buy a house. The US has a law where banks must report any wire transfers over $10k to the government. So, stupid criminal will try to be sneaky by breaking payments up into amounts of like $9,999. In reality that just takes you from a “hey, this person just did a big transfer” to “this dude is definitely laundering money” and you get reported to the financial crimes enforcement agency. My crypto exchange capped withdrawal at 10k, and to raise the limit you had to go through “enhanced verification” which took several months. I needed the money sooner so I was like, well, I can wait several months while the clowns at this crypto exchange get their shit together, or I can withdraw all my money way quicker by transferring $9,999 per a day, every day. Long story short, I got reported so hard that the FBI came to my house 🫠

2024-03-26 18:47:40

My bank wouldn’t let me initiate wire transfers larger than a certain amount without going into the branch in person, but i noticed there wasn’t any limits on internal transfers between my own bank accounts. I ended up distributing the money across several of my accounts, then wiring out the maximum amount from each individual account into a currency exchanger account for consolidation. My bank’s anti-fraud department was like what the fuck, but getting my account unlocked over the phone was still faster than going into the branch and doing a wire transfer in person 🤷‍♂️

2024-03-21 23:54:32

Since someone requested I post more videos from the Chinese version of TikTok, here’s your daily dose of CCP sanctioned educational content
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/112/136/363/183/251/000/original/fb36689459dcaefa.mp4

2024-03-21 21:42:39

I made friends with a local cafe owner and listening to him vent is hilarious. Apparently some dude kept coming in, ordering a glass of wine for him and his wife, then returning one glass and stealing the other. Friend was frustrated because 1 or 2 glasses is just whatever, but by this point the dude had stolen 90% of the cafe's wine glasses. When confronted, he just apologized and said he had just moved in and needed them. Then there's this women who comes in every day and tries to haggle on the price of coffee to save less than a dollar. Every day, without fail, she comes in and tries to claim she gets a special discount from the owner.
What makes it so wild is the fact the minimum rent for a studio apartment in the area is $4,000/month. It's also rental only, so there's none of those old people who bought their place for $2 and a Twix back in the 80s. These people aren't even middle class, they're like top 1% and trying to swindle him out of single digit dollar amounts 💀

2024-03-21 18:14:08

I was sad so my friends gave me this. Shes so pretty 🥹
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/112/135/032/891/382/251/original/13d34a7080c2e53a.png