Cybersecurity incidents are measured in the Kitty Cat scale. It ranges 1 to 10. A 1 is a small incident, impacting a small business or organization. This is most likely a DDoS attack or website defacement. A 3 is slightly more severe. This is akin to detonating information stealer malware on your computer or a WordPress domain hosting or distributing malware. Anything above a Kitty Cat 5 gets more recognition. A Kitty Cat 5 can result in widespread damage such as, economic damage, political damage, and in rare instances the loss of human life. The VERCEL compromise is a classic Kitty Cat 6. It is a large organization with a fairly significant impact. However, impacted organizations is minimal and this was a standard smash-and-grab operation. Is today "the time of our lives"? No, today is a Kitty Cat 6. This will mildly annoy some Digital Forensics and Incident Response people, but this could have been far worse.

Something nerds don't want to admit: they low-key enjoy the chaos Yeah, yeah, ransomware is bad, state sponsored threat actors are bad, but deep down when shit hits the fan it is exciting. Even though it's just a beep boop computer your adrenaline gets pumping

Yeah, so basically the reason why nerds who work on computers are so weird about universities and stuff is because of the weird cultural shift that occurred when the internet really started booming Historically, universities were the only places people could get high quality information, labs, advanced literature, etc etc. They were higher education institutions. When the internet exploded, more and more information was dumped online in extreme volumes. Suddenly, in just a few decades, there is more information online than in universities. Universities no longer possess the elitism or secret knowledge or information they once had. Of course, for argument sake, some exceptions are still place, such as for healthcare. You can read all you want about surgery online, but you need to attend a university to get formal training. Anyway, when cybersecurity first popped up, universities didn't really have any material on it. They did, but it wasn't like it was online with forums and stuff (IRC, whatever) where information was pouring out every day. The problem universities faced was how fast information traveled. The information taught in universities is relatively old. In the age of the internet information is fast. Lightning fast. Everyday I see new malware papers being released. It would be virtually impossible for a university to keep up with this pace. So, the other thing is universities have structure and stuff. Being an internet nerd does not require structure and stuff. Many cybersecurity nerds thrived on being an autodidact and self exploring. When the autodidact nerds find a university nerd, there is a cultural divide whereas autodidact nerd thinks university nerd wasted their time and money and could have learned it themselves. University nerd sees autodidact nerd as someone who (probably) doesn't have an education or feels a bit elitist because they graduated from a university. The elitism they feel circles back to the historical stuff with universities, the secret knowledge, the alumni, etc. Ultimately, nerds can do whatever. Old heads and new head autodidact nerds will thrive and be driven by curiosity forever. Doing this requires immense self discipline and being infinitely hungry for information. University nerds may feel the same, but may feel lost without guidance and are more reliant on structure. University nerds can do well in our field as long as get their feet wet in university stuff, then continue self education outside of the university. Neither is wrong per say, just a different learning style and preferred method.

Oh yeah? You're a "hacker"? Prove it. Show me your carpel tunnel syndrome and nerve damage from sitting in a chair for too long

In the mid-2000's I played a lot of video games. Most notably Halo 2 and Halo 3. I had achieved the highest ranks possible in many playlists. For my Halo nerds, I was a 50 in Lone Wolf, Doubles, Team Slayer, Team Sniper, and SWAT. I was a 47 in MLG. As I became more and more competitive it was semi-common to encounter cheaters. It was primarily people abusing the P2P networking system they implemented (as the kids called it, lag switching). It eventually transformed into people doing DdoS attacks (Distributed Denial of Service Attacks) using popular tools at the time like Cain & Abel (for getting computer addresses in the game lobby) and silly botnet stuff like "XR Booter" and "Biozombie". I became enamored with the concept of DdoS attacks. I eventually had a small little botnet (I was very dangerous, I had over 20 infected machines) and was cheating in Halo as well. However, while many of the degenerate filth I associated with at the time continued to do DdoS attacks and lame shit, I became much more interested in the internals of botnets and computer networking. As a teenager I then took the initiative to self-teach myself introductory computer networking stuff. I mostly focused on the TCP/IP stack. I thought it was fascinating. Eventually however, I became more curious on the "booters" themselves and how they fundamentally operated. After reading through forums and conversing with hundreds of noobs, such as myself, I eventually came to the realization I would need to learn to code to truly understand how these "booters" worked. On FreeNode someone convinced me to grab a physical copy of C Primer Plus ... so, I did. I got the book and suffered. It was insanely boring. I fucking hated it. I hated the "exercises". I hated debugging. The if-else and while-loop conditional statements annoyed me. Data structures seemed intense. The entire concept of the stack and dynamic memory allocation seemed like alien technology. However, I persisted because I was determined to understand what the fuck this "booter" stuff was doing. Was I good at coding? No. Did I learn fast? No. Am I high-IQ 1337? No. Eventually after struggling, kicking my feet, and being self-dragged through the mud I actually finished the book. During this time StackOverflow didn't exist. ChatGPT didn't exist. My only help was forums and schizos on IRC. When I finished my book I decided to lock in and dive into malware. My goal (initially) was to make my own "booter". Yeah, I struggled unironically for like, 2 years, self-teaching myself networking and C to make a shit fucking DdoS botnet. I did some web searching and found a place called "VxHeaven". On there I found tons of papers and source code for malware. I was blown away. Everyday after school I went to VxHeaven and read papers on malware. I took notes, I read papers, I tried copy-pasting source code to understand how it worked. After more struggling I completed some small malware projects. They were never released into the wild because as I learned more I stopped caring about the applicability of malware. I instead exclusively wanted to focus on the "potential" of malware. I wanted to explore malware and ... just do weird stuff on the computer. I didn't want to hurt people. I didn't want to play video games anymore. All I wanted to do was code weird stuff and learn more. Many of my "peers" at the time thought I was lame for this. Anyway, I was a super hardcore loser and stopped writing malware and instead switched up to just regular programming. I didn't think it was possible to do malware stuff as a career. Around 2018, or 2019, I decided to make a website that archived malware source code, samples, and papers. I did it for myself because I wanted to emulate what VxHeaven did. I didn't expect anyone to give a fuck about me or my project. However, much to my surprise, it has exploded in popularity. Am I a faster learner? No. Do I have a good memory? No. I have to re-read stuff like 300 times. I suck at stuff. My only saving grace is, despite being ridiculously dumb, I am absurdly persistent in things I am interested in. This persistence and willingness to fail over and over, yet continue trying, has some how lead me to having a relatively successful career and relatively success website and social media presence tldr video games, tried hard, failed, I'm dumb, kept doing stuff, some how success. Mostly luck and failing a bunch

Reverse engineering tip If you're not sure something is ransomware, run it as Admin on your computer If your documents are no longer accessible and your wallpaper has changed, then it is probably ransomware