I got infected with malware and appreciated by its author

It was a hot summer evening back in August 2014. I was working on my master’s thesis project. The project was about building software controlling a group of mobile robots and at that time I was running some simulations.

The main part was running on a Linux machine, but the simulator had to be run on Windows, so I decided to put it in VMware virtual machine. Looking back, I must admit it was very overcomplicated, but I was still a student and I had a lot of free time.

How I discovered Instagram’s upcoming video calling feature on iOS

Yesterday I managed to grab some screenshots of a video calling UI on Instagram. This is the story of how that happened. I think the description of the process will be pretty useful to anyone who’s interested in reverse engineering to find hidden features.

Source: medium.com

FinFisher exposed: A researcher’s tale of defeating traps, tricks, and complex virtual machines

FinFisher is such a complex piece of malware that, like other researchers, we had to devise special methods to crack it. We needed to do this to understand the techniques FinFisher uses to compromise and persist on a machine, and to validate the effectiveness of Office 365 ATP detonation sandbox, Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (Windows Defender ATP) generic detections, and other Microsoft security solutions.