genuine interest check - Malware Webring

[kakworm]

working on a side site for me to talk about my FAVORITE thing ever.. MALWARE/VIRUSES!!

and i was thinking of making a malware webring for people who like malware/cybersecurity, wanted to see if anyone would be interested?

of course it wouldnt promote the creation of said viruses, its mostly for people who like the concept of viruses (in my case, i like pre-2016 malwares) and those who like cybersecurity

I HOPE AN INTEREST CHECK IS OK TO DO!! just wanna make sure people like the idea and would join before its made 

[Upwader]

I'm not really into cybersecurity (or webrings lol) but I've been a fan of danooct1 since I was like 9 or smth and always wanted to make my own "virus" like the ones I saw on his viewer-made malware videos.

However I was like 10 when he shut down the forums and stopped making viewer-made malware videos. Even then I didn't know how to code.

I'll lurk from the distance and maybe if more people are interested I'll join a webring for the first time in my life.

In other words: Will I be joining a webring? Not today!

[virtualpet2001]

omg ive been a big fan of old malware for years as part of my general "weird software" interest. i would love to join this?! though if u would prefer the websites having actual Pages about malware i dont know what i could contribute... u_u

[kakworm]

I'll lurk from the distance and maybe if more people are interested I'll join a webring for the first time in my life.

AH THATS GLAD TO HEAR !! love seeing other danooct1 fans around.. Im hoping i can get enough people interested ^_^

though if u would prefer the websites having actual Pages about malware i dont know what i could contribute... u_u

OH NO THEY WONT HAVE TO HAVE PAGES !! so dw ^_^ youll be able to join

[Dan Q]

Cybersecurity's my bread-and-butter and - from an academic perspective, obviously - it saddens me how flat and boring the malware space is in recent decades. Nowadays an attacker phishes somebody to trick them into downloading a RAT and then uses that to, what... mine cryptocurrency. Ugh. There's no... artistry... to it any more.

Viruses in particular used to be clever. In fact, the very word used to be much more-reflective of its biological counterpart, which I've written about at length before! Nowadays people use "virus" interchangeably with "malware" (or, sometimes, even with "bug"), and that's a huge disservice to actual viruses!

Traditionally, a virus would infect other programs, injecting its own code into a compiled executable (usually at the end, for convenience, subverting a JMP) to make it's code quietly and secretly run whenever the program was run... and that code would find another executable and "infect" that too. This is, in many ways, analogous to how biological viruses (mostly) work: the virus hijacks the machinery of a cell and uses it to replicate viral proteins, effectively forcing a cell to make copies of the original virus.

Early viruses usually weren't even deliberately malicious: their aim was to spread widely; where they happened to cause harm this was an unintended side-effect. In fact, a handful of computer viruses were intended to be helpful, usually by working to remove a known-malicious virus from infected executables! It was only later that virus writers started to use them to deliver a payload, either to cause destruction or to threaten to do so as a means to coerce payment.

But nowadays, if you're that latter category of virus creator... the kind that's intentionally causing harm... then it's much more-efficient to simply email a million people a .exe that pretends to be a Word document and encourage them to open it. Or just to squat on a popular domain name and put up a fake page pretending to be antivirus software and telling the victim to download your "fix" and run it.

Back in the day, such bold techniques - attempting to exploit people's naiveté instead of their computers - were a joke. The "honor system virus" used to get passed around by email (the punchline being that the virus writer is trusting you to damage your own system and then forward the message on). But it turns out that in our modern world, this is exactly how most malware spreads: targeting people psychologically rather than computers technically, and getting them to subvert their own systems. Sigh.

(Absolutely no shade on anybody who's ever been caught out by a scam, BTW. We're each and every one of us vulnerable to these, sometimes, no matter how experienced you are: if they're caught off-guard, or sleepy, or stressed, any human can make a mistake. This is what scammers rely upon.)

Anyway: all of which is to say: I don't think I'm interested-enough (or at least, exclusively-enough) in malware to join a webring, but I'm interested in what you're up to.