We’ve just been told yesterday that to reduce our attack surface, only Edge will be allowed on our workstations. Reasoning is that it’s difficult to make sure everyone is properly updates their browser, and since Edge is handled by windows updates, it’s easier to monitor proper updates.

While I understand that reasoning, the tradeoff between pretty small risk reduction associated with unlikely attack surface from different browsers, and the massive drop in employee satisfaction, is simply not worth it.

With what has happened around the studio, I’d say it’s good that DE2 was canceled. It was to be made by a ruins of a studio that was stolen along with it’s IP from the original developers and artists, who didn’t manage to navigate the landmine of for-profit gamedev industry, and got basically scammed by investors, who robbed them of their IP and studio through various loopholes and bullshit of shares-based companies. (It’s a pretty nuanced story, and I’m not really sure how it ended up, so it’s better to watch the documentary about it if you’re interrested, rather than take my conclusion from it. I also haven’t followed recent developement, so if anyone knows how that turned out, let me know)

It’s quite a sad and infuriating story, especially since ZAUM was IIRC originally a pretty wholesome art collective of punks and anarchists from squats. It must have been devastating to enter the market with such ideals, only to be scammed of your art by the first investor you encounter, who you might’ve even considered a friend.

There’s quite a few ex-Disco Elysium studios popping out. My favorite so far is the Summer Eternal. It feels like they didn’t want to announce it this early, but because two other studios (Longude, and Dark Math Games) got announced few days ago, they did the same.

Summer Eternal feels the most radical out of the three studios, I really like their manifesto and how they are attempting to mix art-collective with market-based development. And they have some amazing writers.

Here are few bits and pieces of the manifesto from their website, I really recommend reading it. Also, the website linked above is just stunning.

…

As creators and game makers, we have too long been led away from the truth, away from the right to define ourselves as artists in service of the definitive art form of the future, one that has made us dream since we were children.

Instead, the disposability culture operating at the ruthless core of this industry wants us to think of ourselves as cogs in the machine: rudimentary craftsmen, disposable career workers, inert producers of made-to-order marketing-driven “content” — empty calories leaving the soul hungry.

The Profiteer knows that by keeping your dignity low, he will keep you crawling on the treadmill of passion until he lays you off for the sake of the red number in his book.

…

Machine-generated works will never satisfy or substitute the human desire for art, as our desire for art is in its core a desire for communication with another, with a talent who speaks to us across worlds and ages to remind us of our all-encompassing human universality. There is no one to connect to in a large language model. The phone line is open but there’s no one on the other side.

I can’t recommend Maldev Academy enough. It has been an amazing resource, to get into malware development. Keep in mind, however, that malware development is pretty difficult topic. You will have to eventually use WinAPI and syscalls, so learning about that even outside of malware development will help you a lot.

For example, try looking into how to execute a shellcode in memory - allocate memory as RWX, copy some data and then execute it. Try executing it in a different process, or in a different thread of another process. That’s the core of malware development you’ll probably eventually have to do anyway. Manually calling syscalls is also a skill that you’ll need, if you want to get into EDR avoidance.

Also, look into IoCs and what kind of different stuff can be used to detect the malware. Syscall hooks, signatures, AMSI, and syslog are all things that are being watched and analyze to detect malware, and knowing what exactly is your program logging and where is one of the most important and difficult skills you can get.

There probably are a lot resources for these two skills, and they are an important foundation for malware developemnt, so I’d suggest researching that. You’ll probably not get much from looking at other malware, because it tends to be really low-level, and obfuscated, exactly to avoid the IoCs I’ve mentioned above. Implementing the malware behavior after that is the easier part.

Another good resource to look into are C2s and communication, for example Mythic C2 has some interresting stuff.

And I really recommend joining the Bloodhound slack. Throughout my cybersecurity carreer as a Red Teamer, the community has helped me a lot and I’ve learned amazing stuff just by lurking.

I’d recommend Half Life: Alyx.

Or, you can probably make an absolute beast of Skyrim through mods.

it’s also important to keep in mind that the cybersecurity field has adbanced tremendously, with cloidfare, EDRs, and in general it is now way harder to do anything anonymously without getting caught, quickly. This also males the field of hacking way more difficult to get in, which combined with reduced attention span of younger generations probably means there’s not that many bored teens willing to put the time in, and as an adult you have way much more to loose, so for hose who had the skills it would be a lot greater risk.

As someone who works in gamedev, I’m sure that some of the people there are passionate about it and it is gutwrenching to see your work fail so hard. I’m sad for every project that launches after years of work and fails to get any attention or sales, and I’m definitely sure there’s someone losing sleep due to that.

I never worked in super-large projects, but I did work for a AAA studio and even there, you got people invested into the project.

From how I’ve seen it, you wouldn’t work in gamedev unless you are passionate about it, because you can get drastically better pay for the same job in other, more business focused, industries. So, if all you cared about is money, you have better options.

I spent three days trying to get a RaycastCommand (Unity’s jobified raycasts) working to get multiple hits per raycast. Should have been easy, according to the docs:

The result for a command at index N in the command buffer will be stored at index N * maxHits in the results buffer.

If maxHits is larger than the actual number of results for the command the result buffer will contain some invalid results which did not hit anything. The first invalid result is identified by the collider being null

maxHits The maximum number of Colliders the ray can hit

Well, no. I was getting super weird results and couldn’t get it to work properly. First thing I checked was if I’m getting two+ hits for any of the raycasts, because you simply can’t trust Unity. And I was getting multi hits, but seemingly at random.

The error? I was sorting the hits by distance using bubblesort, and made a simple error with index in it. Which resulted in me seemingly getting two hits per ray sometimes, but it was just a result for another ray moved there by faulty bubblesort. Because unity actually doesn’t support multiple hits per ray.

I couldn’t find the original thread about the issue (which was two years old by the time I was dealing with it), which had an amazing reply from Unity:

I have discussed it with an engineering team, and RaycastCommands don’t support multiple hits because it was difficult to implement. The documentation just doesn’t explains it really well

The fuck doesn’t explain it very well??? It literally describes a parameter that sets max hits per ray and tells you how to get the multi hits from results…

Fuck unity :D

Whi getting through college, I was always bummed that we have to learn a lot of stuff that seemed super irelevant to my future carreer, while also being annoying. Stuff like prolog, Phyro, Lisp, Assembly, or bunch of obscure math.

It was only years later when I finally realized why it was important - the school wasn’t for teaching me to be the C#/Java programmer, but it taught me to be A programmer. I can pick up and start successfully writing anything I need, in any language, relatively quickly and without issues, nonmatter whether it’s functional, objective, or wharever style of language, because I’ve very probably already had to deal with, learn, understand and pass exams in language that is similar to it, since college made me learn a language from almost every style or flavor of languages there are.

I was surprised when I first saw colleagues struggle with picking up languages other than the ones they work in, and that was when I finally realized why and how sneakily did the college make me a universal programmer without me noticing it. And that’s something that’s harder to get when self-taught, because you don’t get exams and it’s easier to miss the point and just skip courses on lisp, prolog or lambda calculus, because it seems irrelevant, but the different point of view and approach used when writing in those languahes is what will teach you the most.

On the topic of Mullvad, what made me choose Kullvad over LibreWolf was the VPN being bundled in. If I’m not mistaken, the whole point of ToR browser is that you have exactly the same fingerprint as any other Tor browser user, making it a lot harder to distinguish you from others using your extensions, browser and other minor stuff your browser reports about you, that combined makes for a pretty unique fingerprint, evej of you are using a VPN.

But, if you have a browser that has the same fingerprint for all users, and it has an accompanying VPN, you can partly expect that most of other users of the same VPN will also be using the same browser, making it a lot harder to track you - because while there may be only a few thousands users of Mullvad in the wild, which renders the same fingerprint not much of an advantage (because you would be one of the few users of i.e Proton VPN with Mullvad), if you also use Mullvad VPN, it’s probable that most of other users who share your Mullvad VPN IP are also Mullvad browser users, making it easier to blend in.

Bit that’s mostly my theory, why (along with being able to pay with Monero) I feel like the combo of Mullvad browser and VPN is the best combination as far as minimizing fingerprint is considered. If someone has more knowledge about the issue, I’d love to hear some counter-arguments or tips how to improve my setup.

https://www.ccpgames.com/

EVE is one of the most unique games I’ve ever seen and I admire it, and CCP in general, from what I’ve seen in their volunteer programs or from streams, seems like a nice workplace.

Also, Island is cool.

Then the book will definitely be up your alley, it’s exaclty about that, and offers a great tips about how to approach it.

I cheated the MFAs by switching what I could to SMS, Yubikey or just copying the MFA private keynto Bitwarden. Kind of defeats the point of MFA, but makes stuff definitely easier.

Anything that’s important however is on yubikey, however.

Also, good luck! Are you going through the Digital Minimalism book? I should refresh on it, every time I try it, it doesn’t last long, but I always get rid of one more stupid online habit that I don’t pick up when I inevitably return to my pre-reading the book intetnet usage. So, after already going through like 4 attempts in the last 3 or 4 years, my internet usage is slowly but surly changing for the better. But it’s more of a long run, rather than being able to get everything on the first try, in my experience at least.

If you’re not doing it because of the book/haven’t heard of it, I definitely recommend reading Digital Minimalism by Carl Newport.

How to best approach starting secops in a small indie gamedev studio. We don’t even have a sysadmin, and our boss mostly also does most of our infra together with one of the programmers.

We would love to start setting up some basic security setup, ideally FOSS based, and while I work there as a programmer, I do have 5 years of experience working as pentester and doing red teamings, so I kind of have an idea about what we could have. But I never did anything from blue team side, and also worked for large corporations, so most of the tools and solutions I’ve encountered are waaay over the budged of 20 man indie gamedev studio.

How would I even start? Are there any frameworks that would help but arent aimed at large corporations? What of the buzzwords we even need? Do I start with hardening group policies, get rid of local admins, then set up some kind of log management/SIEM, then IDS? And it’s so hard to google for, because every blog post I found is just a disguised ad for a company that does Security as a Service. Why isn’t there some kind of easy 10 step program that would tell you “step 1. Harden configuration. Step 2. Install <one of many security tooling acronyms>.”

I vaguely know that most of the buzzwords that are thrown around have some dependencies, but what? Does IDS needs logs from SIEM, or is it the other way around? I’m obviously not qualified for this, but i dolid get time to research it, and some DIY attempts is definitely better than having no security in place at all. And, I know very well how to actually hack and test our security setup, so I can at least tell if something I’ve done is shit or useless :D

I’d go for scandiavia, if I could choose anywhere. Or Island, working for CCP is my dream job.

When I tried that, it lasted me for almost a year and a half, before I unfortunately got a second job that required MFA and I needed to be more online in general due to juggling two jobs. And it was amazing!

What I eventually did however was to get a dumb phone that can do a wifi hotspot, and still carried my smartphone but without simcard and net access, and powered off. When I really needed to get a taxi or look up a way home when I overslept drunk on public transport and ended up who knows where, I could always just fire up hotspot, power on the smartphone and do stuff I needed. Cause when that happened first time, it was when I first realized how much dependent I am on smartphone and net access.

Thanks for reminding me, I just quit one of the jobs and I can afford to be more offline, so back to the dumb phone I go! Convincing my GF again that she has to text me instead of using discord will be hard, though … Or explaining that I really cant look up the fact she wants, or call a taxi quickly…

I still have a python bot that forwarded discord messages to my own bare html website, so I can chat with her with the basic web browser of the dumb phone.

Yeah, I know and that’s what I’m afraid of. I guess I’ll just have to come to terms with most websites not working in some obscure web browser that’s not feature-complete. Would actually help with my addiction, so it won’t be so bad, I guess.

You are right, it was unfairly harsh wording, I apologize for that. Most of those products are super cool and important, I’ve kind of extrapolated it from what I’ve read in other posts about them spending too much on stuff like events and other, non-developemnt, related stuff that I actually never checked, while also not realizing that they also have a ton of other projects, which mixed with the dissapointment with the recent development about the Meta partnership led to me choosing that wording unfairly.

If it keeps going on like this, it won’t be long before I’ll just say fuck it and switch to elinks…

Hmm, on that note - is there any CLI web browser that can do javascript and css? Because iirc, elinks doesn’t, though I havent used it in years.

IIRC, only like 2% of Mozilla spending goes towards FF (I may be misinterpreting something, but I remember 2% being thrown around), so funding FF without rest of Mozilla bullshit shouldn’t be that hard. Of course, since Mozilla did spend so little on FF, it’s a question how much they actually care about FF and what would happen if they lost access to their golden goose. They shouldn’t have problem funding FF, but they probably have other bullshit they don’t want to let go and that has more priority for them.