3 ms·
> The malware consisted of rows of seemingly random letters and numbers flowing down a page, in pairs. In the margins were some recognizable English-language wo
by jasonhansel 6y ago
> The malware consisted of rows of seemingly random letters and numbers flowing down a page, in pairs. In the margins were some recognizable English-language words—“Windows,” “everyone”—connected by cryptic punctuation. Choi could fluently and sensitively parse all this.
So...it was a hex dump?
- nkozyra 6y agoAh yes, the hacker's secret cryptographical weapon! (It certainly reads that way)
- sn41 6y agoMust be an advanced hacker tool if it shows in "margins". My hex dump shows it only in one margin. /s
- wahern 6y agoThe canonical (-C) output for BSD hexdump(1) formats data like this: 00000000 54 68 65 20 71 75 69 63 6b 20 62 72 6f 77 6e 20 |The quick brown | 00000010 66 6f 78 20 6a 75 6d 70 73 20 6f 76 65 72 20 74 |fox jumps over t| 00000020 68 65 20 6c 61 7a 79 20 64 6f 67 |he lazy dog| This is also a common default format for many hex editors. The visual representation columns--which display all isgraph(3) ASCII values as their ASCII character, and every other 8-bit value as "."--could be interpreted by lay readers as a margin that decodes the octal and hexadecimal values which take up the 4/5ths of the 78-column display.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- MaximumYComb 6y agoInterestingly, malware often hides these strings with different types of obfuscation.