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Title: Zero Day Authors: Mark Russinovich, Howard Schmidt Category:supplementals Number of Highlights: 4 Date: 2022-07-17 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, “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”
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.
The Russian Mafia is heavily involved in financial fraud through malware.” Jeff stopped and thought about the implications of what he’d just said. In recent years the Russian Mafia had hired the best software engineers in the former Soviet Union to create new viruses and unleashed them on the cyber world. They were making hundreds of millions a year, and the more they made, the more aggressive and creative they’d become.
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.