Cubic

I occasionally do fun personal projects that are just for me. For the past couple of weeks, I have been occupied with a personal project to pull large swaths of content down from the Internet and ingesting them into a multi-gigabyte database for the singular purpose of finding "good" movies that I haven't seen before. It took a while to decide what "good" would be qualified as. I'm not a fan of most PG-13 and R-rated films because they tend to just be gross for a wide variety of reasons but plenty of PG and even G-rated films have issues too. Very few films make it above the garbage heap and manage to be actually good (e.g. acting, CG/VFX, musical score, singing). However, sifting through hundreds of thousands of movies manually to find the good stuff is not how software developers do things. Let's just say that there was some mischief with web scraping involved using the Ultimate Web Scraper Toolkit . I ended up combining three different database...

Today we do a deep dive into a portion of the Portable Executable (PE) file format and discover some rather broken behavior in the Microsoft Windows OS that causes some processes to not start up because the Windows loader gets confused about what a RVA is. The PE file format is how all executables (i.e. EXEs) and things containing executable code (e.g. DLLs) are loaded into memory and run. It's a highly structured file format and has many features not found in other executable formats for other OSes and has many nuances and details surrounding it, some of which are intentionally obscured. One of the more complicated concepts for someone coming into the PE file format to understand is the Relative Virtual Address, or RVA for short. Microsoft defines the RVA as: "The address of an item after it is loaded into memory, with the base address of the image file subtracted from it in an image file." Another way of saying it is that a RVA is the offset from the base addre...

A couple of years ago, Equifax was breached and huge tracts of data were dumped. The Equifax CEO and other leadership dumped a bunch of stocks days after discovering the hack and a month prior to the announcement for "unrelated reasons" (yeah, right). The apology by the CEO for the data breach rang hollow with everyone and he eventually stepped down with a $90 million USD golden parachute. The breach was partially caused by lax policies regarding keeping the software running on their servers up to date. But no one in the software security industry was shocked that any of this happened - it's the same old story of greed, lax security policies, and not regularly pentesting infrastructure. The news this week is covering the landmark FTC settlement with Equifax and a page on the FTC website has been set up that links to the Administrator website for the claim proceedings: https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/cases-proceedings/refunds/equifax-data-breach-settlement The d...