We all know better than to click on random links. Malware and scams frequently hide behind a mysterious looking url, yet a part of me – driven by curiosity – wonders what lies beyond that click. However I never satisfy that desire because I am uncertain of the mechanisms of how malware could end up on my device. In this post I take away my ignorance on the topic by diving into the nitty gritty technical details of a drive-by download attack.

I am currently working as a part time student ICT support engineer for a financial company. In said company we obviousely use a firewall. Before working there ‘firewall’ was kind off a fancy IT buzzword to me – Something I didn’t know nor cared about. Now at the time I had just started my masters thesis in the field of privacy preserving data publishing (PPDP). That really sparked my interest in online privacy, leading me deep into the rabit hole of privacy centered blogs, books and youtube channels (yes…Google, sadly these content creators have to reach an audience somehow). And I remembered watching a video of Mental Outlaw on OpenWRT, a FOSS router/firewall firmware that runs well on low specced devices.

The news recently broke that Skiff is joining Notion and that their email services will come to a halt in 6 months. This practically means that every online account using skiff has to have its email updated in 6 months time. This is mildly annoying to do for one or two websites, but people usually have hundreds of accounts and changing email for every one of them is a very time consuming task. What’s worse, is that people often don’t know exactly to which sites they’re signed up with their email account. They will surely think about their Facebook, Twitter and Youtube account, but what about that obscure crypto exchange you forgot you had an account for? This leaves a big doubt in the back of people’s heads: “Did I update all of my accounts?”

I just came across a blog post that is just so well written. It puts into words exactly how I think about writing! I aspire to one day be able to write like that. It puts into words why I wan’t to have a blog. I don’t write for the reader… I write for myself. So I can put my thoughts on paper. So I can delve deeper into the subjects that I’m really interested in. While writing my previous blog post, I really feel like I learned something that I will never forgot, just because I wrote it down and tried to make it easy to understand for the reader. I had to really think about how to structure it, and it stuck with me. It may have been a small article, but I am proud of it.

Context

Recently I was learning about the bittorrent protocol from this excellent video series on youtube. The creator of the series Arpit Bhayani explaines all about the protocol, the seeders, the leechers, decentralized (the usual). Then he explained what a .torrent file was. A .torrent file has a bunch of fields to get the file names, file lenghts, the url to find the tracker where your torrent is listed. These files are bencoded (or the files are bencoded encoded? idk). He suggested that it was a good idea to write your own decoder for bencoded files.