George Zipperlen via plug on 29 Mar 2020 14:44:57 -0700 |
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[PLUG] virus virus spotted roaming the cyber-wild |
COVID-19 infected spam spotted in the wild -- a virus within a virus... Part I: From the UseNet junk folder (ascii only, while wearing hazmat gear) Yes, it's a pale shadow of its former glory, but I occasionally browse for <redacted> and giggles. And, in this case, because UseNet mal-messages are an unfiltered mirror of email-mal-messages, and even www vectored spam and malware. Showing my age: I remember "Canter & Siegel", curiously relevant to the immigration issue... <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel> Anyhoo, here 'tis: Apparently I cant send even header-less spam snippets Is there a way to *quote* spam *plain text* oozing with parasitic mindworm keyword memes that gets past the spamhaus 'AI' ? The rest of my message: Normally, I would consider this sort of thing as merely a financial hazard to a small percentage of fools, and a potential cyber hazard to those who employ a subset of these fools in a foolish company culture... Right now, I consider this to be a public health hazard, and possibly a national security hazard -- if there are actors of non-financial scam flavor bundled deeply within. Or, there might be a 'white hat' phishing expedition bundled with it... Those are just the obvious cases. I don't have the inclination to fire up a Tor browser for this, because I suspect tor exit nodes to be honey pots, and I have no inclination to play deeper games. "Heisenberg effect" Just by involvement with FOSS and mathematical cryptography, together with my education and employment history, I'm a person of slight interest. Not complaining, it's a compliment! I'm now, in time of crisis, taking the <slight> risk of having expressed public interest in this particular spam. Is anyone bot data-mining this kind of dreck on the email side, or is it all in /dev/null ? Concretely, is there some place I should forward this particular payload url ? Even if this is merely a low-level scam, now is the time to put the *hammer* down on that stuff. It is the computer virus form of spitting on the groceries. No longer a forgivable prank, if it ever was. Part II: The 'meme payload' is partially legit, although over hyped by some. TL/DR: there is a potential relationship between the immune system response to malaria, and to COVID-19 SARS. Might be gold, might be a dead end, might be gold in a completely different direction. Too early to tell without much research, which is underway. I am not knowledgeable in epidemiology, immunology, mol-bio, genetics... but I gleaned a relevant paper by digging through "COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19)" <https://pages.semanticscholar.org/coronavirus-research> with my rudimentary data-skillz, I found from 1990 (!) Hemoglobin degradation in the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum: an ordered process in a unique organelle. D E Goldberg, A F Slater, A Cerami, and G B Henderson Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1990 Apr; 87(8): 2931–2935. doi: 10.1073/pnas.87.8.2931 PMCID: PMC53807 PMID: 2183218 <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC53807/> |
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