Getting frustrated with the lack of response from people I've been trying to reach out about this research project, but fuck it. My life already sucks, and it is just going to get worse.

I've been researching into something very interesting, and the rabbit hole starts at: https://www.choosewell2024.com/

Which is the beginning of what I see as a deliberate attempt at rigging the presidential elections and getting cult like legislations passed.

If you scroll down you will see the cornerstone partners which are the four organizations that are I believe basically well the cornerstones of this movement. Most notably right now are The Family Policy Alliance and also The Heritage Foundation.

The Family Policy Alliance being linked to The Family Leader and also Focus on the Family. The Family Leader is an evangelists' cult group that has been trying to basically get the USA government to adopt a more extreme evangelist structure and pass legislations that will make all our lives' hell. Focus on the Family have been pushing the propaganda focused on families and children.

The Family Policy Alliance is a group of Family Policy Councils in roughly 40 states. Some being more prominent than others such as Idaho, Iowa, Ohio, Massachusetts, Michigan, etc. Michigan is particularly interesting since the DeVos family, that made billions off of a Ponzi Scheme and have been involved with conservatives and The Family for decades. Also, it seems like the Alliance Defending Freedom is the legal arm.

The Heritage Foundation has a long history of "advising" the government, especially the President, on policies and how the government should be. This started with Reagan and their Wikipedia has a nice history in a nutshell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation

The Heritage is trying similar with Reagan, but way worse in a German-Nazi style take over called Project 2025: https://www.project2025.org/

When I say this is German-Nazi style, I'm not overexaggerating. Adolf Hitler failed his first coup attempt and while in prison he created his political plan and ideology which sure looks like what Project 2025 Playbook is.

Anyway, I have some more to share, but I'm exhausted and to be honest... history is repeating itself, and we aren't doing shit about it like last time.

#osint #infosec #infosecurity #cybersecurity #cybersec #research

Bunch of us old geezers were reminiscing on #IRC (yes, IRC is alive and well, thanks for asking) about the #goodolddays. Thinking back, some of the stuff was quite wild. So gather around younglings:

• At one stage “IRC Wars” was a thing. Initially a bunch of kids would try to convince one of the channel operators to give them operator status, too. If some of the channel OPs was foolish enough to grant the status the attacker would promptly DEOP the original channel OPs and kickban them. This would usually be combined with adding insults to the channel topic and making the channel invite only. Retaliatory attacks were also quite common. At some stage there were multiple IRC channels held by various “factions”, while the actual discussion occurred on backup channels. Some channels were held for years.

• The “IRC Wars” (d)evolved over time. One feature weaponized was the “netsplit” where the loss of network connectivity would effectively split the network in two separate functional sub-networks. The protocol would self-heal when the connectivity returned: This involved reintegrating the channels by merging any divergencies. One result of this merge operation was to merge any operators on channels. Thus, if you found a server that was “in split” for long enough time and had no local users on the victim channel, you could join the channel and would gain operator status as the “first user” on this “new” channel. When the network eventually joined (so called “netjoin”), you would be awarded operator status on the victim channel and could proceed with channel takeover.

• “Nick collision” was one aspect of the netjoin (the network healing after a split): If two users had the same nick name, this conflict would be resolved by disconnecting both users from the network in a so called “kill”. Thus you would just have to obtain the nick name of the target user on one of the servers on the other side of the split and wait for the network to heal. Some highly coveted nicknames were stolen using this method. It would also commonly be used to collide all original operators in a channel takeover.

• Many bots were written as both defensive and offensive weapons in IRC Wars. The defensive bots would attempt to hold OP status away from malicious parties while granting it to the rightful owners of the channel. These bots grew highly sophisticated and attempted to dodge attack such as nick collisions. Offensive bots would track the nicknames of the legitimate channel operators in an attempt to collide them.

• There were technical disagreements on how nick collisions should be handled. This, along with philosophical disagreement on whether there should be set rules defining what SysOps could or could not do, led to the EFnet network splitting in so called “Great Split” of 1996, resulting in creation of IRCnet.

• Phoenix IRCII script had a gaping security vulnerability in the message save feature that could be used to directly execute shell commands on the victim’s shell account. Needless to say this could be used to not only compromise the user but to also gain foothold on the actual (typically a brand of UNIX or BSD) server running the IRC client.

• At some point many users connected over modems. At the time isolation between control and data channels was poor or completely missing. If you could get the victim host to send special string towards the modem you could control it remotely. ICMP ECHO was particularly effective. ping -p 2D092B2B2B41544830 would send a “+++ATH0” towards the victim, and if the echo was responded, it would send back the same data through the modem. “+++” would enter the Hayes command mode. “AT” was a common prefix for “Hayes command set” commands, while “H0” meant “hang up”. Needless to say if the victim was a modem user and the system responded to ICMP ECHO the user would promptly have their modem hang up and connection would be lost.

• WinNuke (URG pointer mishandling in Windows TCP/IP stack) was used to disconnect IRC users. “Ping of death” (oversized ICMP ECHO with payload larger than 65535 bytes) was also used, as well as various other DoS bugs in network stack implementations, such as LAND attack. Eventually also flooding and primitive DDoS attacks were also used.

• I once found a #mIRC IRC client vulnerability that could be used to boot any mIRC user off the IRC network: The mIRC built-in IdentD had a bug where it would get confused if multiple concurrent connections were made towards it. If these connections would just sit there it would result in the whole mIRC network process to time out, disconnecting the user. I did demonstrate this vulnerability on #mirc channel – in hindsight this is something that I probably should not have done. I did learn a valuable lesson at least.

This all was many moons before my career in #infosec started. #oldschool #internethistory #exploits