Got some unwelcome news first thing today: Someone I've known for many years recently took their own life. Feeling angry and sad and like a shit friend because we lost touch at some point, and I had no idea of their struggles. But I definitely could have been more curious. My response so far since hearing this news has been to reach out to a few people I've not checked in w/ for a while.
I've been made aware of a post from someone representing Rufus who says I'm very confused about this post. I've reported that Windows Defender went bananas after I installed Rufus on a Windows 11 device. It immediately popped up warnings about hacktools and trojans being installed while it was installing. I wish I had a record of it but I nuked everything after the alerts.
I mean, I might boost this post, but I'm sure as hell not going to like it. Am I weird or what?
why is liking your own comment even a thing?
Is it ironic that your Windoze PC gets infected while trying to download a file that allows you to write an installable Linux ISO? I think very much so and I'm still LOLing about it.
@gunchleoc @aetios @jab01701mid Right, so you get the idea behind this post :)
Let me congratulate infosec for really stepping up, this cyber awareness month has been going gangbusters!
Let's not let up now, there's still a week of awareness to deliver!
I didn't realize how strong a community Rufus has. Please don't shoot the messenger.
I love all the commentary about how I'm supposedly inventing things here. Supply chain hacks or just selling one's site/brand happens. If you don't like the results too bad. Check them yourself.
Look, compromises happen to everyone. I have received a ton of private messages asking if I'm okay. But the reality is that I stopped using Windoze a long time ago and this was a kind of one-off thing where I was trying to re-image an old system anyway (away from Windoze).
Everyone has kind of laughed it off but there’s actually now an official investigation by multiple organizations into why my US election ballot hasn’t been released from US customs in a month without any explanation.
A kind reader submitted the Rufus installer to any.run, a sandbox which walks through the installation of software to find malware that gets installed only *AFTER* the executable is clicked. You can see exactly all of the post-install prompts to download additional software that I also saw.
However, in my defense Google's default search results list rufus[.]ie as the authoritative site
No clue whether the resulting ISO is also malicious, but tried running it just for giggles on a spare Windows PC from bootup and the machine's bios said nope, wouldn't allow b/c security policy. Not sure if it's related but I've never seen that message before trying to boot up from a USB.
Not sure who needs to know this, but if you download and install the Windows version of Rufus, the free software for writing ISO images to USB/CD-ROM, your PC will end up with about 100 trojans.
Edit: Had a conversation with the maintainer(s) of Rufus, who told me the malware alerts were almost certainly from Windows Defender scanning the files in the Linux ISO I was trying to burn, and not from the program itself. I'm willing to accept that may be the case here, but I also no longer have a way to check b/c I nuked the system after all the alerts, and the bios produced a warning when the system restarted.
The right-wing owners of Scientific American, once the pillar of science writing, have ruined the publication's content and reputation. An incredibly sad situation: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/scientific-american-springer-nature-trump/
Got up early today to catch a bit of the Orionid meteor shower. Had a killer view of Orion and it was very clear, but spotted only two shooting stars in about 20 min (one was bright green). But OMG are there a lot of satellites. They're most visible right after sunset or right before dawn and it was a bit distracting watching all the traffic. If you've not spent any time stargazing at these times lately, you might be surprised at how busy it's gotten up there.
:blobcatthinksmart: