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The scariest "user support" email I've received

devas.life

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Re: The scariest "user support" email I've received

#261

Post by 1718627440 »

robinsonb5 wrote: post #173
duskwuff wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the personal website that would be casually hosted whenever your PC is on I don't think that was ever really a thing. Which isn't to say that no one did it, but it was never a common practice. And free web site hosting came earlier than you're implying - sites like Tripod and Angelfire launched in the mid-1990s, at a time when most users were still on dialup.

People did indeed do that - and dynamic DNS didn't kill it, thanks to services like dyndns back when it was free.

There are gratis DynDNS services?

Re: The scariest "user support" email I've received

#262

Post by 1718627440 »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #49
gs17 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially when it's just a base64 decode directly piped into bash.

Especially when ChatGPT didn't get it right : the temp file is /tmp/pjKmMUFEYv8AlfKR, not /tmp/lRghl71wClxAGs. (I'd be inclined to give ChatGPT the benefit of the doubt, assuming the site randomly-generated a new filename on each refresh and OP just didn't know that, if these strings were the same length. But they're not, leading me to believe that ChatGPT substituted one for the other.)

Does ChatGPT have a bias to specific random strings? Could that be secrets or biases in secrets in the training data?

Re: The scariest "user support" email I've received

#263

Post by duskwuff »

1718627440 wrote: post #261
robinsonb5 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People did indeed do that - and dynamic DNS didn't kill it, thanks to services like dyndns back when it was free.

There are gratis DynDNS services?

There were in the early 2000s. They certainly didn't emerge as early as free web hosting, though.

Re: The scariest "user support" email I've received

#264

Post by 1718627440 »

duskwuff wrote: post #263
1718627440 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are gratis DynDNS services?

There were in the early 2000s. They certainly didn't emerge as early as free web hosting, though.

I meant that as a statement, that they are gratis today, paired with confusion, what they are talking about.

Re: The scariest "user support" email I've received

#265

Post by flexagoon »

lukeschlather wrote: post #254
croes wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are less confident pasting it in https://www.base64decode.org/ than in https://chatgpt.com ? That makes no sense.

I pay ChatGPT money and I have more confidence they've thought about XSS and what might happen with malicious payloads. I guess ChatGPT is less deterministic. Maybe you're right and I'm not paranoid enough, but I would prefer to use an offline tool (and using an LLM does seem worthwhile since it can do more, I can guess it's base64, the LLM can probably tell me if it's something more exotic, or if there's something w…

> If you think that there's obvious answers to what is and isn't safe here I think you're not paranoid enough.

I don't think so, I feel like the built-in echo and base64 commands are obviously more potentially secure than ChatGPT

Re: The scariest "user support" email I've received

#266

Post by alsetmusic »

didgeoridoo wrote: post #68
nerdsniper wrote: post #57

The binary itself appears to be a remote-access trojan and data exfiltration malware for MacOS. It provides a reverse-shell via http://83.219.248.194 and exfiltrates files with the following extensions: txt rtf doc docx xls xlsx key wallet jpg dat pdf pem asc ppk rdp sql ovpn kdbx conf json It looks quite similar to AMOS - Atomic MacOS Stealer. It also seems to exfiltrate browser session data + cookies, the MacOS key…

I can’t even exfiltrate my MacOS Notes on purpose . Maybe I’ll download it and give it a spin.

I've had great success exporting using the Shortcuts app pretty recently. Do a web search for the relevant terms and you'll find examples.

Re: The scariest "user support" email I've received

#267

Post by blooalien »

anthk wrote: post #189
DocTomoe wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a kid who was raised editing and tinkering memory blocks out of CONFIG.SYS, I've been watching this for a while when the GenZ-Mobile-Generation showed up and was not able to do the darnest things. I see with terror in my heart that the downward ride isn't yet over.

Gen-Z people without AI (AWS' downtime for sure put tons of vibe coders/vibe sysadmins in their place) will be doomed. Mark my words. I didn't grow by editing DOS config files, but I began with it in Elementary and I've got Debian Woody (later Sarge) in my late HS teen years. OFC I played with game emulators, settings, optimizations, a lot, and under GNU/Linux I even tweaked some BTTV drivers for some El Cheapo TV Tu…

> The amount of thinkering these people had omitted because of smartphones and such it's huge.

On the other hand, I've met people in the Godot game engine community that have built entire games on Android devices using Godot (yes, actually used an Android phone and the Godot game engine to build a game; not simply exported an Android game from a PC), so that only proves to me that if someone's got that "hacker spirit", they'll find a way to indulge it, even if the only thing they've got to work with is a smart-phone (and a spare keyboard / mouse layin' around). Problem is that mentality isn't encouraged quite the way it used to be back in the early days of the tech industry. The advertising and entertainment industries have "optimized" the Internet for "engagement", but most definitely not for the betterment of humanity. You gotta have that drive to build and create things or you'll get sucked down the various total waste of life rabbit-holes provided by the brain-sucky industries.

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