[PLUG] virus virus spotted roaming the cyber-wild

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/ >


--
Be Well!

George Zipperlen
--
George Zipperlen
george.zipperlen@mail.com 


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