“I can already tell it wasn't good news,” Peter said, obviously reading my down-turned eyes and lack of smile, perhaps the color of my cheeks. “Usually, when you come back, you're bubbly,” he added. “But you look like you are about to tell me my cat has cancer.” Peter was plump, like me, with the hint of an East Coast accent and constant twinkle in his eyes. He was also invisible when looking The Other Way. Not just to me, but to everyone and everything. As an empath, having a friend I cannot read is delightful. And he was right, it wasn't good news, but not all bad, either. He leads the way, in silence, to my study where light refreshments are waiting. We sit side-by-side on the antique sofa, where I've often slipped from my body into the æther. But the trip I just took required a more controlled and thoughtful environment. I grip Peter's hand, “They showed me quite a bit.” “Was Saffron there?” he asks. I snicker, “Why do you call her that?” He shrugs, “'Saffron' seems to match her essence and I can't pronounce a string of animated, hyper-dimensional ideograms.” “Yes,” I say. “She was waiting for me at the Carnival.” I take a deep breath and exhale slowly. “Do you want the bottom line or the whole story?” I ask. Peter just raises an eyebrow. “'Whole story' it is, then.”

The sky was a kaleidoscope of pinks, purples, and colors I can't describe, rotating, folding, emerging. It's always breathtaking. But they created the Carnival for me to have a familiar place to walk, to anchor my perception. They know me and treat me with some level of respect afforded to those who pass their tests. She knew why I was there. They always know. She was shorter than me, humanoid but shaped like a bowling ball with pale / grey / ashen / luminescent skin and blue / black / red hair in a pony tail / pixie cut. She gave me cotton candy flavored like dreams. “You must / will ask / plead / already know,” she said. “How can we stop it? How can we save ourselves from the hatred fueling the move toward authoritarian fascism?” I asked. “You cannot / will not / must not / could never / not your fault,” she told me. With a gesture, she showed me how far back it goes, how helpless we are against the sins of our ancestors and our descendants. The flood of information, pictures, sounds, words, entire histories was far too much for a human mind to comprehend. But I've been here enough times to know the rules are different. I was able to “slow it down” and comprehend what she was telling me. The world we live in is based on slavery, colonization, conquest, manufactured inequality, and brutality. She showed me versions of earth where there was no Inquisition, no Alexander the Great, no Genghis Khan, no British expansion, no slavery, no extermination of natives, no treating one human as less than another for reasons beyond their control. Thousands of variations. Millions of possibilities. They created worlds unrecognizable. Certainly you and I did not exist, but neither did the countries we know, the languages, the technology. They were so far removed from here as to be fantasy. And they were the only worlds that did not succumb to this culmination of hatred. She showed me as far back as the founding of the United States that it was already too late. All we can do is shift the timeline. There are some things mankind must experience so that we do not forget what we are capable of.

“I'm sure that's not where she left it,” Peter interrupts. “They don't do that.” I nod, “True, but it's not much better.” “I have privileges. The privilege of generational wealth, the color of my skin, a home that is paid for, the ability to see other people's truths before they do.” I squeeze Peter's hand, “Friends I can trust and lean on.” “Being an out lesbian pagan puts me at risk, but I can protect myself,” I say, adding only in thought, “for now.” I lower my head, “She suggested I bolster our defenses and, along with everyone else, experience humanity seeing itself as it really is.” “She said we must acknowledge and confront what we are in order to become what we might be.” “She reminded me that I have been spared the violence that murders and marginalizes people for their gender or the color of their skin or the deity they worship or any uncontrollable circumstance of their birth. I have been immune to the violence inflicted on others for not being male and heterosexual because of my privileges.” I turn and hold both Peter's hands. He can see the change on my face because he smiles and nods for me to continue. He knows I have a plan. “I want to work with Doug and Eric, even Emma and Eunice to turn our shared acerage into an official sanctuary, fully warded and protected. We'd need your expertise with runes, obviously.” Peter chuckles, “If we can't save everyone, we'll save who we can?” “For starters,” I say, grinning. Peter squints and I can tell he's working it out, thinking about the specific connections, knowledge, skills, talents, and resources of each of my neighbors. The psychedelic techbro, the lycanthrope luddite, the conspiracy theorist empath, the bitter faeries living in my garden, the sacred space we all maintain and respect. “We're gonna organize a resistance,” he says flatly. I'm beaming, slowly nodding, “We are going to organize a resistance.”

#Psychomancer #Writing #ShortFiction #Writer #Writers #WritersOfMastodon

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

I sat in cold darkness, the bare basement concrete replacing the cave where I first made contact. The single candle's light like water on the walls. The knife had been consecrated under the new moon and wrapped in black silk for 28 days. The cut on my arm burned but they called for sacrifice. The burning was but my life leaving, being transformed, offered. And the words I'd found. A language of smoke and steam, of cracking ice and glaciers sliding across continents. Speaking the words, if you can call it speaking, in the cold dark over a basin of my own blood, inside the carefully drawn symbols, I called upon the Shadows. The walls glistened and danced. And pushed into the room. My ears popped and began to ring. My teeth hurt. I smelled the sweet rot of organic compost. The air whistled and hummed. “Wise Umbral,” I asked, “Have I called you properly?” “You have,” the darkness answered. “Have I erred,” I asked. “You have not,” the shimmering shadows said. I felt a sting on my arm, where the bandaged cut was throbbing. “Does my offering please you?” I asked. The floor vibrates beneath me, like a tremor. “Yes,” the air replies. “Does my offering satisfy you?” I ask. Something like wet sand brushes against my injured arm. Wet. Cold. Siphoning heat. “For now,” it whispers. “For now,” even quieter. “I would know how to end the collapse of our nation into authoritarian fascism.” A breeze twirls around me, sniffing me, “Why do you care, little magician? You are protected.” “I made my offering, Great Umbral,” I say, swallowing hard. “I have performed the appropriate ritual,” I added. It is not a question. I feel a thump in my chest as if the density of the air itself was changed. “So you did,” the walls shake with the voice. “So you did,” it repeats in a conversational tone, adding, “I will tell you the truth.” A brief wave of nausea and dizziness wash over me. The thud of a great mass impacts in front of me. I cannot see it in the sparse light but the candle reflects off its oily surface shaped like nothing living. It squats before me. I can feel its icy gaze, the pull of its almost gravitational force against my soul. A sound like flutes, like bells. “I will tell you,” it says, in a voice like a man's. “You can do nothing but survive like the cockroach you are,” it begins, relishing the chance to remind me of my place. “Every course of action you can imagine will make no difference, even killing every single one of them. In fact, you'd only make things worse with your righteous fury. Worse, but not in a way that pleases us. We serve suffering and some things must simply be allowed to transpire.” I know they cannot lie, but they can mislead. But this I have never felt. It is not taunting me or challenging me. It is not teasing at answers just out of reach. It is not hinting a greater sacrifice might persuade it to divulge more. It has “sat” in front of me and addressed in a man's voice. Is it smiling? I can feel its contentment. Its relief. I understand. Our plays at subterfuge, hoarding knowledge and truth, self-preserving power, blackmail, secrets. Answering our calls and asking only for blood. None of it matters to them. For they play a much longer game and we are less than pawns.

#Psychomancer #Writer #Writing #Writers #WritingCommunity #WritersOfMastodon #ShortFiction #ParanormalFiction

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

VENDOR: colormagic

• stickers files
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VENDOR: makestickers

• stickers files
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    • specify 3” x 1.7”

VENDOR: moo

• stickers files
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  • 
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  • 

Test blog entry please ignore

Starting a new blog to document my progress in modern tech

There's a term that a character uses in a book named something like “churn” but the classic interpretation is when customers just stop using a product. My skills, I've noticed in the last eight years, are generalist and I'm capable of doing lots of tasks. However, it seems having the skills is now just.. “expected.” I'm being churned!

I can code and document/write technically. I can do databases, firewalls, networking. I've built home labs (still do!) to keep up to date. I learned how to do things with the ELK stack when documentation on just getting started was minimal if not missing (for the current version that just released, that was). I'm learning how to do proper API and backend engineering now, and it's really neat.

I can do DFIR, imaging, examinations, manual carving. Scripting, reverse engineering, finances, woodworking/carpentry are in my bag of skills. Heck, if it's anything dealing with technology in the years I've been alive, I've used it, dabbled with it, implemented it and administrated it in some form or fashion. Heck, give me permission and I'll pick your locks you need open.

Lately, though, what's EDR? XDR? Why is suddenly everyone looking for SOC jobs? Why are there suddenly 300 certifications for things? Why is everything suddenly about blockchains? Didn't we figure out the scalability of this was a mess? Why is everything using ML and LLMs to generate.. everything?

What did I miss!? WHAT YEAR IS IT!?

Rust, though, is pretty cool. I like it. Along with a lot of other programming languages, but with Rust I can write code that I can be proud of when it works.

I'll write my musings here. Apparently having soft skills is a thing supersede actual skills. I feel like I need a Rosetta Stone for translating my old skills to what new jobs want and what titles they apply to. I guess I'll also need to specialize in something, but I like being able to do every part to some degree.

Failing to Analyze Hajime Mirai

The following is my attempt analyzing the Hajime Mirai variant, including wondering why ida wouldn’t disassemble, why upx wasn’t unpacking the malware sample, and what I learned over the process. The main reason why was I gave myself a one week crash course on malware analysis and looking into IOC and tried a live sample MJH and I pulled from a honeypot we have setup the past few weeks ago. I have learned many things despite my failings that is presented in this blog post.

Static analysis

The first thing when I downloaded the malware sample is to run strings and hexdump. It didn’t pull any significant information no tangible words other than the fact it was an elf file for linux. Digging though I than attempted to run through IDA on linux in an attempt to reverse it into assembly and then continued to struggle wondering why it wouldn’t open this led me into an adventure into packers.

Packers, UPX, unpacking, and a continued struggle session

I ran into the detect it easy packer for linux it a really good tool that reads the hex values and detects which packer is used if one is used. I figured the reason the malware wasn’t running was the fact that it was in a packer was encoding it preventing ida from doing it’s magic. That isn’t how it works, but I was on the right track about the packer being involved with malware. After using D.I.E (detect it easy) I was given this.

Figure 1 a snapshot of the packer upx as it’s packer.

So, simple enough I just have to run the sample though upx and we have our malware we can analyze, or at least that what I thought.

Figure 2 upx not detecting any packing.

So now I was confused for awhile now I was trying to play with LZMA part of it, but after awhile I figured I was just struggling to struggle and gave up.

Any run and trying to walk around the issue.

Now after some googling I know Hajime was based of Mirai, but there was a lot I didn’t know about Hajime, like how it was p2p iot botnet. It accessed and issued commands based on a Distributed Hash Table. So I figured I’d try to piggy back off other peoples work and dig into Hajime and other similar samples. Now there are Hajime samples on anyrun, but searching the hash leads to these results

Figure 3. everyone trying to run an elf binary on windows.

Eventually I found abuse.ch yara scanner and desided to throw it threw the yara scanner and it dumped out this.

Figure 4 yara results of abuse.ch yara scanner

so there is a detection against unpacking so I know I’m on the right track

I eventually gave up and removed the network card and tried to run the malware and see what would happened and “bash: ./020f1fa6072108c79ed6f553f4f8b08e157bf17f9c260a76353300230fed09f0.elf: cannot execute binary file: Exec format error”

The reason I was having such a hard time is that it’s arch was MIPS R3000 I am currently googling how to emulate MIPS R3000 on x86_64 now and trying to figure out my next step, but I wanted something to show for it.

Malware sample sha256: 020f1fa6072108c79ed6f553f4f8b08e157bf17f9c260a76353300230fed09f0 It can be downloaded via malware bizarre https://bazaar.abuse.ch/download/020f1fa6072108c79ed6f553f4f8b08e157bf17f9c260a76353300230fed09f0/

test

test

Intro (h1)

The following is my attempt in reversing and analyzing the Mirai variant, including wondering why ida wouldn’t disassemble, why upx wasn’t unpacking the malware sample, and what I learned over the process. The main reason why was I gave myself a one week crash course on malware reversing and tried a live sample MJ and I pulled from a honeypot we have setup the past few weeks ago. I have learned many things despite my failings that is presented in this blog. If you have any experience in any of these fields you will look at this thinking what was I thinking and to be frank I wasn't just trying out some new things and some shooting from the hip.

Static analysis (h2)

The first thing when I downloaded the malware sample is to run strings and hexdump. It didn’t pull any significant information no tangible words other than the fact it was an elf file for linux. Digging though I than attempted to run through IDA on linux in an attempt to reverse it into assembly and then continued to struggle wondering why it wouldn’t open this led me into an adventure into packers.

Packers, UPX, unpacking, and a continued struggle session (h2)

I ran into the detect it easy packer for linux it a really good tool that reads the hex values and detects which packer is used if one is used. I figured the reason the malware wasn’t running was the fact that it was in a packer was encoding it preventing ida from doing it’s magic. That isn’t how it works, but I was on the right track about the packer being involved with malware. After using D.I.E (detect it easy) which saw the packer UPX[LZMA, brute modified]

So, simple enough I just have to run the sample though upx and we have our malware we can analyze, or at least that what I thought.

So now I was confused for awhile now I was trying to play with LZMA part of it, but after awhile I figured I was just struggling to struggle and gave up.

Now after some googling I know Hajime was based of Mirai, but there was a lot I didn’t know about Hajime, like how it was p2p iot botnet. It accessed and issued commands based on a Distributed Hash Table. So I figured I’d try to piggy back off other peoples work and throw the hash into anyrun and got this.

Everyone trying to run this elf binary on a windows system. I don't really know the backstory if it's a automated process, but it didn't help much.

Eventually I found abuse.ch yara scanner and desided to throw it threw the yara scanner and it dumped out this.

so there is a detection against unpacking so I know I’m on the right track

I eventually gave up and removed the network card on my VM and tried to run the malware and see if I can do any dynamic analysis.

“bash: ./020f1fa6072108c79ed6f553f4f8b08e157bf17f9c260a76353300230fed09f0.elf: cannot execute binary file: Exec format error”

The reason I was having such a hard time is that it’s arch was MIPS R3000 I am currently googling how to emulate MIPS R3000 on x86_64 now and trying to figure out my next step, but I wanted something to show for it, so I wrote this, hopefully you had fun reading my blunders.

Malware sample sha256: 020f1fa6072108c79ed6f553f4f8b08e157bf17f9c260a76353300230fed09f0 It can be downloaded via malware bizarre https://bazaar.abuse.ch/download/020f1fa6072108c79ed6f553f4f8b08e157bf17f9c260a76353300230fed09f0/

Outside: warm, windy, Spring Inside: brooding, melancholy, gray

I've been slacking again.

This evening, I'm finishing off a Basil Hayden Toast Small Batch. It's 80 proof, “artfully aged”, but no age statement.

It starts with some toasted marshmallow and cinnamon on the nose. Leads with some carmel, cinnamon, and maybe cherry or peach. There's a hint of toasted marshmallow in the middle, but the finish is a little weak.

I like it, I think it's a fairly inexpensive bottle—this one in particular was a gift.

It's got some oaky heat that lingers after the sip. I prefer to have it with an ice cube. A splash of water is also a good choice, if you prefer the heat.

• The Psychology of Political Cults by Andrewism
• Losing Reality by Robert Jay Lifton
• Age of Propaganda by Anthony Pratkanis & Elliot Aronson
• Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism by Robert Jay Lifton
• How to be a dictator by Frank Dikötter
• Syndicalism and the transition to communism by Ralph Darlington

https://keyoxide.org/9EEDA1912E63EA6957C5E5BAECED8D5E12FA2A5F

This page will be expanded over time. Send DM's to @fauxialist_alternative on Instagram with suggested additions.

NFP's and Lobbying Groups

• PARA – Palestine Australia Relief and Action – Focuses on rehabilitation and aid for Palestinian migrants refugees in Australia. Founded and run by Palestinian immigrants.
• AFOPA – Australian Friends of Palestine Association – NFP from South Australia, primarily focused on political lobbying. Successfully delayed the Australia-Israel Free Trade Agreement in 2021. Founded and led by Palestinian immigrants.
• APAN – Australian Palestine Advocacy Network – BDS-aligned political lobby group with a focus on government divestment and sanctions.

Other good resources

• Palestine Free Trade Australia – Sydney-based NFP importing goods from Palestine. Runs a general humanitarian appeal, as well as an education project in partnership with Friends of Hebron Sydney.