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Title: Zero Day Authors: Mark Russinovich, Howard Schmidt Category:supplementals Number of Highlights: 14 Date: 2025-09-14 Last Highlighted: **
Highlights
He recalled that the young Winston Churchill, upon being sent to South Africa to cover the Boer War for a newspaper, had written after his first combat experience, âNothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.â
Code was the machination behind the curtain that made everything else work. Code turned keystrokes into words in word processing, code made images, code produced color, code created hyperlinks. Everything on a computer screen came from code. Those who could write code at a sophisticated level were creators; a handful were, in their way, godlike, for what they wrote produced marvelous manifestations.
These worms descended to the depths of the computer, burrowing down and existing like a living parasite, planting themselves within the operating system. They were designed to resist detection. To mask themselves further, they worked slowly at replicating clones, sending out new versions of themselves to seek new computers at an all but undetectable rate. They were a cancer on the Internet and on every computer they entered. They grew, spreading their electronic web into every space they could find. This was the future of all serious malware, one increasingly concealed from detection by a cloaking technology known as rootkits.
âAll security systems are reactive in nature. That means the virus has a head start in infecting computers before itâs identified and enters the log of the antivirus and firewall programs.
Zero day was a term used to identify software bugs for which no fix exists, that arenât widely known, and that malware authors use to spread their viruses.
Tags:technology
The safety of the Internet, and of those computers connected to it, was dependent solely on the security of each individual computer that formed part of the network.
Tags:security,technology
Internet crime had outgrown illegal drug sales, netting more than $120 billion annually.
âSheâs a very kinky girl, the kind you donât take home to mother.
The Sober worm, one of the most proliferative ever released, actually communicated with its creator. The guy wasnât a dunce. The worm checked specified URLs on certain days to search for instructions on what destructive act to commit. The thing was, the URLs didnât exist. The creator knew the ones heâd planted in the virus. When he was ready to give it instructions, he created the URL on the day he wanted to tell it what to do. How did you stop something like that? Jeff thought.
Rootkits werenât limited to malware. In 2005, Sony had released a range of CDs that were designed to prevent excessive duplication. The End User License Agreement accompanying them was not complete in that it failed to inform customers that the CD was installing a rootkit onto their personal computer.
He was a born bureaucrat, adept at evading responsibility for errors while garnering praise for work heâd not performed. He made few enemies over the years, which served him well.
An amazing amount of code could be written to produce almost nothing. Useless code lay everywhere, occupying a cyber universe with its clutter.
Team), which technically reported to him at DHS, where he was now chief of counter cyberterrorism. US-CERT was expected to operate independently, alerting him only when they came upon an issue of national security. This was the first time sheâd ever asked to work in the field.
In this time of exhibitionist tattoos and body piercing, with the supposed equality of the sexes, it seemed to Jeff that many women were just mimicking drunken sailors on shore leave in their expressions of independence. One of the consequences, he believed, was that men of his generation, and those of the one coming up, seemed no longer to respect women or hold them in the esteem they once had.