#sofacy

[fantroll-purgatory]

FIRST: Alternia or Beforus or some type of AU? Alternia, Hiveswap era

Name (preferably include how you came up with it and why): Sofacy Lavern (Sofacy is a cyber-espionage group and Laverna is a goddess of thieves, cheats and the underworld, both because she is a hacker)

Oh I love this, Especially w/ the cyber-espionage bent because Laverna was specifically invoked to help thieves keep their cover. This also makes me maybe want to put a Thieves’ Cant spin on her symbol. 

Age: 7 sweeps

Strife Specibus: glovekind (for the weapon I was thinking a cyberpunk like glove that has a keyboard so she can connect to any device on the go if she has to)

I kind of like the idea of her having like… a technokinetic branch of telekinesis, something more mirco/electrokinetic that she syncs through this glove to allow her to refine her abilities. Good for hacking, can also release a static shock in an emergency situation but that’d fry her system for a hot minute, so it should be used Sparingly. 

Fetch Modus: Yeah I’m really bad at these

You know those Hacking Puzzles in video games that are almost always like this- 

Each of her items gets locked behind one of those and she has to solve it to get the item out.

Blood color: Rust

Symbol and meaning: Armini, sign of the Reconciler

This is definitely good, but I wanna Maaaybe bring in some thieves’ cant inspo when it comes to spriting the symbol on. Maybe. 

Trolltag: crimsonCanker (a canker as in an infection, as a reference to viruses she makes and spreads)

Quirk: u r goin to paY for this lol (Capitalizes Y, uses ‘lol’ and ‘mfw’ frequently and shortens words, all lowercase letters and no punctuation, starts a new row instead of using a period)

Special Abilities (if any): Regular rust abilities, telekinesis and can commune with the dead

Like I said above I like the idea of her kind of having trained and used tech to refine her ability down to being techno/microkinetic, too. Really fine and technological work is a lot easier when you can use your mind powers to do it. 

Lusus: I have no idea I looked for one for a while and I just couldn’t find anything that fit the theme

Hmmm. Maybe a bear? Sofacy comes up in relation to Fancy Bear, so it’d at least be appropriate name-wise. You could probably also go for Chameleon, for the camouflage/espionage angle, but that starts leaning a little voidy. Because of Sollux’s lore worldbuilding about apiculture networking, bees are also associated with Technology and thus doominess. So you could give her a Flightless/Sterile Queen Bee lusus. Her inability to fly would push a doomy feeling because of the metaphorical inability to run and the inability to create new life, which only works narratively since life is doom’s opposite.

Personality: She used to be part of a large anonymous hacking group that taught her everything she knows. They were activists that started with fighting against injustice online but when they moved to fight against Alternia’s oppressive system, starting with the censorship in the mediums of entertainment they all loved, they were seen as a serious threat and were all caught and killed after a slip up. As the only survivor, after watching all of her friends and her lusus die and having her hive destroyed she has become bitter, fearful and fatalistic. She lives in hiding, trying to lay low and has given up serious activism in a mix of nihilism and fear. Her views on Alternia and the spectrum haven’t changed, but it has proven to be too great a foe and has made her jaded. Now she has gone back to shitposting and highlighting people’s ignorance. She is harsh in her call outs, quick to dig up dirt and mock away anyone she sees spewing bad arguments, hypocrisy and lies. Still, she manages to stay as humorous as she can, even though her jokes tend to be either morbid and cynical or just mocking someone. Sofacy is cheeky and smug to hide the fact that, after being burned once, and as much as she wants to speak up again about the serious issues, she is deathly afraid of making a mistake again.

Oh I Love this personality, really strong and solid. It also makes her placement as a Witch of Doom fascinating because it positions her in session in a place where she has to learn to overcome that passive acceptance and fear in order to overcome inevitability, to literally Change the rules and fate itself. 

Interests: The paranormal (ghosts, demons etc.), creepypasta stories and video games (horror games most of all), she also loves scaring people with her prank viruses. If only she enjoyed digging up dirt on people and exposing lies as much as shitpost and memes she’d be a serious threat.

Imagine her in a gossip competition with your Regina George Archetype Troll. 

Title: Witch of Doom

Land: I have no idea

Land of Harrowing and Hacks. A ruined world where everything is crushed underfoot and ever more destruction seems on the horizon. Some how, in some way, the Denizen of this world has hacked into the system and built a world where they always win. Time for Sofacy to change the rules.

Dream Planet: Derse

Design time:

So I’ve done two versions, one with regular Armini and one with the addition of of the “underground entry” symbol into the symbology. 

On the face, I had to add that little lash because Homestuck Style dictates lashes, and I added the eyebags a little more visibly because she’s supposed to be a fearful and traumatized character- she’s gotta look tired. I also did a few proportion edits, but nothing Major. 

Other than that, lots of outline edits for better/more visually appealing contrast!

-CD

[precisioninternetmarketing]

PinchDuke

The PinchDuke campaign, which operated from November 2008 until summer 2010, is believed to be the first campaign of the Duke malware family. PinchDuke targeted political organizations in Georgia, Turkey, Uganda, and the United States. The PinchDuke campaigns began 11 days after President Obama’s April 5, 2008 speech concerning the deployment of missile defenses in Poland. In 2009 the PinchDuke campaign targeted the Ministry of Defense in Georgia, the ministries of foreign affairs in Turkey and Uganda, a United States foreign policy think tank, organizations associated with NATO exercises in Europe, and the Georgian Information Centre on NATO. In 2010, the group also targeted Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan. The political nature of the targets suggests that the campaigns may have been state sponsored. The selection of targets closely mirrors those of the later APT28/ Sofacy campaigns, which is widely believed a Russian state sponsored threat actor. Like the rest of the Duke family of malware, the threat actor is attributed to Russia because error messages in the malware are written in Russian. Though many regions in Eastern Europe use Russian as their primary language, time stamps in the code suggest that the malware was developed in the same time zone as Moscow. The PinchDuke Trojan samples contain a text string that may serve as a campaign identifier to help the attackers differentiate between associated Duke malware campaigns that were run in parallel using similar exploitation kits.

[jmj973]

OnionDuke

In October 2014, Leviathan Security Group disclosed that a Russia based Tor exit node was attaching malware onto the files that passed through it by wrapping legitimate executables with the malware executable. The technique increased the attacker’s chance of bypassing integrity check mechanisms. The malware campaign is believed to have been active from at least February 2013 through spring 2015. OnionDuke does not operate like the other Duke campaigns; however, it does share some C&C infrastructure with the miniduke attacks. Moreover, unshared domains in both campaigns were registered using the same alias, John Kasai. As such, it stands to reason that OnionDuke is another Russian sponsored APT group. OnionDuke attacks target government agencies in Central Europe. However, because it is unlikely that European government agencies are accessing Tor from their high value systems, the secondary distribution vector of the malware remains unclear. The malware has also been found targeting pirated software. It is possible that the campaign distributes the malware through scattershot attacks via the Tor network and torrent sites and through another yet unobserved vector, such as phishing or wateringhole attacks. The infection of Tor files appears to fail if the victim users a VPN channel that encrypts traffic. Systems infected with CozyDuke may be infected with OnionDuke if the former malware is used to deliver and execute the latter malware’s dropper. It is possible that the OnionDuke attacks were conducted to infect a broad range of target to gather information for the other Duke campaigns and to build a botnet for the adversary.

[jmj973]

PinchDuke

The PinchDuke campaign, which operated from November 2008 until summer 2010, is believed to be the first campaign of the Duke malware family. PinchDuke targeted political organizations in Georgia, Turkey, Uganda, and the United States. The pinchduke campaigns began 11 days after President Obama’s April 5, 2008 speech concerning the deployment of missile defenses in Poland. In 2009 the PinchDuke campaign targeted the Ministry of Defense in Georgia, the ministries of foreign affairs in Turkey and Uganda, a United States foreign policy think tank, organizations associated with NATO exercises in Europe, and the Georgian Information Centre on NATO. In 2010, the group also targeted Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan. The political nature of the targets suggests that the campaigns may have been state sponsored. The selection of targets closely mirrors those of the later APT28/ Sofacy campaigns, which is widely believed a Russian state sponsored threat actor. Like the rest of the Duke family of malware, the threat actor is attributed to Russia because error messages in the malware are written in Russian. Though many regions in Eastern Europe use Russian as their primary language, time stamps in the code suggest that the malware was developed in the same time zone as Moscow. The PinchDuke Trojan samples contain a text string that may serve as a campaign identifier to help the attackers differentiate between associated Duke malware campaigns that were run in parallel using similar exploitation kits.