21st century malware found in Jane Austen's 19th century prose Cisco's 2015 Midyear Security Report has revealed that at least one group of malware-spreading scum has a literary bent. The report found one group of criminals who were hosting a webpage designed to inject exploit code into unpatched browsers. Typically these landing pages have very little on them, often just random text, but …
What's your metric for "a very small intersection"?
In this thread you already have John H Woods and me, and I can think of a couple other Austen & security fans off the top of my head.
Now, had you said "Maria Edgeworth fans", you'd probably be onto something. Castle Rackrent is OK, but I believe I speak for everyone in IT security when I say it's hardly an undying classic.
It has been said of cryptic crosswords that the setter's aim is to lose [against the puzzle solver], but to lose slowly and with humour. Since I am not brainy enough for cryptic crosswords, I take some pleasure in deciphering hyperbolic headlines, be those in The Reg or New Scientist. However, I can't parse "21st century malware found in Jane Austen's 19th century prose" in any way that agrees with the actual article.
tl;dr I usually enjoy Reg Headlines, but this one wasn't in the spirit of the game.
" However, I can't parse "21st century malware found in Jane Austen's 19th century prose" in any way that agrees with the actual article."
The target web page's visible content is the text of a Jane Austen novel. Hidden within that content is the means of delivering malware to a reader's PC.
That seems to fit the title.
" I can't parse "21st century malware found in Jane Austen's 19th century prose" in any way that agrees with the actual article."
Same here. I was expecting an article about how a passage in Austen's prose triggered a reset or lockup of iPhone, Android, and/or Winphone*.
*Or whatever the Hell Microsoft's calling it this week.
I had assumed that, through random chance, some of Jane Austen's 19th century prose just happened to be executable, perhaps something like when the endianness assumption was reversed.
Of course, the modern operating systems, upon noticing some data that could possibly be executed, immediately do so.
The next vulnerability that will be revealed will be when the texture of the distant clouds in an image just happens to be represented by numbers that could be executed, and the helpful OS screams, "HEY CODE!" and instantly dives in.
I figured they were referring to that chapter from the variant second edition of Emma where the title character briefly considers the romantic fortunes of the oddly-named character Robert'); DROP TABLE gentlemen;--. It's missing in other editions, but you can find it in the Oxford variorum.
That's why the x86 protected mode has descriptor bits to tell what a segment can be used for - but it requires proper separation from code and data - something scripting languages don't achieve - and it requires proper segment management by the OS, something most OS never cared of and simply initialize segment descriptors to allow access to everything in the process address space... even the NX bit is something of a later hack.
"...OS never cared..."
The poor quality of OS code is revealed by, just one clear example, the relationship of RAM size and Hibernation files.
If your PC has 2GB of RAM, when you put it into hibernation, the resultant hibernation saved state file will be about 2GB.
If your PC has 4GB of RAM, when you put it into hibernation, the resultant hibernatiion saved state file will be about 4GB.
Etc.
It's obvious that the OS has no idea which parts of memory are actually being used (something it plays a role in managing), so it has to save the entire RAM space, including many GBs of zeroes, as part of the saved state. Can't even be bothered to compress it to save time.
It's 2015, and they still haven't figured out something as trivial as this. Pathetic!
Am I the only person on Earth that's noticed that adding RAM to a PC makes it slower to go into and out of hibernation mode?
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