Hello, world!

Welcome to Playfairsec! I am a security researcher who has worked in various security roles in various large companies and government entities. My passion is reverse engineering. I will be using this blog as an outlet to keep my RE skills sharp, as well as hopefully helping others out along the way! On occasion, I come across malware that has not been satisfactorily torn apart, in my opinion, so I hope to use this as a place to dump random analyses and other things I find cool. The hope here is really to help others who may be searching for a random string or some other breadcrumb from an obscure sample they found on their network. If this site can be stumbled upon by just one person who is in a similar circumstance, I will be happy.

All samples on this blog can be found publicly via malware sandboxing and analysis sites like Hybrid-Analysis, which keep a running list of files submitted by other users. I will not add any analysis of malware found from any other source, as that can be dubious from an operations security and legal standpoint. I also try to avoid public reporting of the samples I analyze, aside from the initial reporting from the sandbox. I am more into this to work on my skills as an analyst than to post only the new hotness. Analysis on here will usually consist of things that I found personally interesting, whether it has been reported on in the past or not.

Feel free to reach out to my Twitter, @playfairsec, if you want to see something in particular, but I will limit anything I post about to things that have been previously uploaded to a public site (see previous paragraph).

Actual malware in the wild