Random Humorous Things - A Light-Hearted Thread

[Rev. Rye]

One man attempts to solve that timeworn dilemma: How would you get a small cylinder (5.1in length, ~4.5in girth) unstuck from a mini M&Ms tube filled with butter and microwaved mashed banana?

[awty]

The wind blew in yesterday dropping our temperature by about 50 degrees. In the midst of this wind getting really amped up, I made a quick run to a local store. My hair wrapped around my face and as I walked in I was trying to untangle this mop of hair. Guy in front of me chuckles and says he hates when that happens and removed his ball cap to show a nearly bald head.

Nice to see there are still some people with a sense of humor and who don't take themselves too seriously.

[Rev. Rye]

Context for Yanks: Nigel Farage is probably the closest thing England has to Trump, yes, even closer than Boris Johnson. He’s responsible for Brexit becoming a thing, and he also has a Cameo page.

Ian Watkins was a British singer for the band Losptophets. Note the past tense. He was absolutely pure fucking evil. He also died recently, getting shanked in prison, and when this happened, more people expressed sympathy for the shank having to be so close to Ian than Ian for dying. 

Anyway…

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Farage said ‘Ian Watkins was a good man who loved his children.’  Hard to think of a more monumentally inappropriate requiem.

Boru

[The Valkyrie]

I'm taking my boss to court for discrimination.

Other staff bring in their emotional support animals.

But my emotional support shotgun is "inappropriate", "scaring the staff" and, "where the hell did you get that thing??".

[The Valkyrie]

Got a visit from HR today.

Apparently, I shouldn't answer my phone with, "for fuck's sake, what now?"

[The Valkyrie]

I think we're about to get a major war.

China has announced that molesting children is now punishable by death.

That's a direct threat against a sitting US president!

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Boru

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

'Wow! It's like you read my mind!'

'Yeah, well, it's not exactly War and Peace.'

Boru

[Angrboda]

Anyone who's been on the receiving side of a ransomware attack can tell you they didn't have a good day. But what if that day was terrible for not just the victim, but also the attacker? Thanks to a coding bug, that's precisely the case with a variant of ransomware from the Nitrogen group that encrypts target data and literally tosses away the key, rendering the data completely unrecoverable.

The exact ransomware in question is Nitrogen's VMware ESXi variant, which targets hypervisors (virtual machine host servers) and presumably encrypts the virtual machines residing therein. Hypervisor attacks aren't new, and existing analysis shows that while sysadmins are generally good at deploying endpoint protection on hosted operating systems, they sometimes have lax policies regarding hypervisors.

What this ultimately means for victims hit by this particular strain is that they need not pay the ransom the group demands, as no one will be able to decrypt the data. The only course of action available is to fetch the latest backups. Should those not exist, the only option left is probably grief counseling.

At a technical level, what happens is that at the start of the data encryption step, part of the encryption public key is overwritten with zeros (8 bytes, or 64 bits). Since public and private keys are always specific pairs, this means no one has any idea what private key would match the now-mangled public key, assuming one can even computationally exist. Veeam's technical deep dive on the issue gives the impression that the bug was a common off-by-one mistake.

Nitrogen ransomware programmers lock themselves out of a payment — key management bug encrypts victims' data forever