The Novel Encounter

[Otilia Mojarro]

Tryingto identify a novel I read - probably in the 1950s or 1960s - about a cabin boy on board a sea-going freighter who battles with an alien called "The Ancient" who has taken over the ship. The alien materializes by de-materializing the substance of an ordinary object (such as a carpet).

Almost certainly written for children or younger readers - but with some fairly ahead of their time technical concepts - for example: the implication that the alien entity had been on Earth an extremely long time and the careful adherence to conservation of mass/energy, rather than making its existence and materializations/dematerializations "magical" or "unexplained".

Hardback cover was a picture of "The Ancient" (human form, shoulder length grey /white hair (center parted), dressed in a sweater and slacks, surrounded by some members of the freighter crew, pointing angrily at the story hero - the cabin boy).

There is certainly a being (The Ancient) from some miles off in The Man front Outer Space but he remains sadly earth-bound. He is planning world conquest from a new-fangled submarine and can assume any human shape and...

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Background: Reduced motivation is an important marker of psychiatric disorders, including depression. We describe the female encounter test, a novel method of evaluating reward-seeking behavior in mice.

Methods: The test apparatus consists of three open chambers, formed with partitions that allow the animal to move freely from one chamber to another. A test male mouse is habituated in the apparatus, and subsequently a female and male mouse are introduced into a wire-mesh box in the left and right chamber, respectively. The time the test male mouse spends in the female or male area is measured for 10 min.

Results: All six strains of mice tested showed a significant preference for female encounters. The preference was observed in 7-30-week-old mice. The preference was blocked by castration of the resident male test mouse, and was not affected by the phase of the menstrual cycle of the female intruder. The preference was impaired in mouse models of depression, including social isolation-reared, corticosterone-treated, and lipopolysaccharide-treated mice. The impairment was alleviated by fluvoxamine in isolation-reared and lipopolysaccharide-treated mice, and it was improved by the metabotropic glutamate 2/3 receptor antagonist LY341495 in corticosterone-treated mice. Encounter with a female, but not male, mouse increased c-Fos expression in the nucleus accumbens shell of test male mice. Furthermore, both the preference and encounter-induced increases in c-Fos expression were blocked by dopamine D1 and D2 receptor antagonists.

Each book in your encounter is handpicked, and well-rated. Perfect for any avid reader (such as yourself) looking to spice up a TBR list. Enjoy a world of engaging books selected to spark curiosity and delight.

The packaging was beautiful. I was going to wait until my daughter was here to open it so she could see how nicely it was done but I couldn't wait. I took a picture instead.

The extras were included are very nice. I was pleased with the book.

Airport Ranger volunteer Stacy Broussard expected a peaceful Saturday morning ride around the perimeter of Houston's airport. What she encounters instead is a brutal homicide and a baffling mystery. Next to the body is an injured dog, the dead man's motorcycle, and a drone armed with a laser capable of taking down a 747. Though FBI Special Agent Alex LeBlanc sees a clear-cut case of terrorism, his past has taught him to be suspicious of everyone, even witnesses. Even bleeding-heart veterinarians like Stacy. But when her gruesome discovery is only the first in a string of incidences that throw her life into a tailspin, Alex begins to wonder if Stacy was targeted. As a health emergency endangers Stacy's community, and the task force pulls in leads from all directions, Alex and Stacy must work together to prevent another deadly encounter.

Why should a 19th-century Italian novel about 17th-century war, famine and plague be of interest to a 21st-century American reader? Because it treats timeless themes of cultural encounter: rich and poor, sacred and profane, outsiders and insiders, and saints and sinners.

Over the course of the 2023-2024 academic year, the Future of the Humanities Project is sponsoring a series of lectures on cultural encounters in collaboration with the Georgetown Humanities Initiative and Blackfriars Hall, Oxford.

In a world increasingly divided along national, religious, and cultural lines, Pope Francis has called for a "culture of encounter" that promotes communication and builds trust while acknowledging the inevitability of conflict. Cultural encounters that entail the recognition of others in their otherness are a contemporary imperative with a rich thematic history in literature and the humanities. This series will bring leading scholars together, across disciplines, to explore themes of encounter both in classic literary works and in contemporary cultural debates. The hour-long virtual events will include a Q&A with the audience. Following the launch event, all subsequent events will take place at 11:00 a.m. ET/4:00 p.m. UK.

The novelization of "Encounter at Farpoint" is an adaptation of "Encounter at Farpoint", credited to David Gerrold. A Pocket TNG novel published by Pocket Books, it was first released in October 1987.

In the time between encountering P2Pinfect and publishing this blog, Unit42 researchers also published an in-depth analysis of the Windows variant of the malware. According to their findings, the variant they encountered was delivered via exploitation of CVE-2022-0543, a LUA sandbox escape vulnerability present in certain versions of Redis. Cado researchers witnessed a different initial access vector, which will be detailed further in this blog.

A common attack pattern against Redis in cloud environments is to exploit this feature using a malicious instance to enable replication. This is achieved via connecting to an exposed Redis instance and issuing the SLAVEOF command. Once replication is complete, the attacker can load a malicious module (a Linux shared object file) which extends the functionality of Redis itself. This initial access vector was first demonstrated in 2018 and has been used in a number of high-profile cloud malware campaigns since - including H2miner and, more recently, Headcrab.

Shortly after replication, the MODULE LOAD command is used to load the malicious shared object file exp.so. This shared object extends the functionality of Redis, providing reverse shell access for the attacker and adding a new command system.exec,which allows arbitrary shell commands to be run on the host.

This method of abusing the config set dir command can also be used to an attacker-controlled SSH key, ensuring backdoor access to the host if successful. P2Pinfect also attempts this exploit, providing redundancy in the event that other Redis exploitation attempts fail.

To establish persistence through reboots, the binary writes /path/to/binary to .bash_logout. This results in the binary respawning after any bash session is exited, whether that be via a TTY or via SSH. Normally, this would be done using .bashrc to run the command on login. However, using .bash_logout instead ensures that any analyst performing an inspection of the system does not have a chance to spot the process, as it is spawned after they log out.

A binary called bash is dropped to /tmp, and run using execv() with an argument of -bash. Doing this results in the binary looking nearly identical to a real instance of bash when viewed in ps aux. After being run, the file self-deletes. The bash binary scans through /proc, and opens the stat for each process in there, as well as monitoring the /proc directory for changes. The bash binary will restart the main payload if it is killed, as seen below.

bash is also capable of performing upgrades on the main binary. It reads in the main binary and validates it matches the latest signature file pulled from the botnet network. If it does not match (e.g. due to tampering or a newer version being available), the old instance is killed, a new version is downloaded to the same directory with a random name, and then executed.

The main binary will also monitor other processes for the file operations. Based on some unclear criteria (likely the amount of files opened and IOPS) it will try to kill processes that exceed a threshold. It is speculated that this is to try and detect incident response or analysis tools enumerating the disk or the creation of a memory dump.

In addition to bash, a copy of a binary called miner is dropped in the current directory with a random name, executed, and then deleted. Despite the name, the binary does not appear to actually be a crypto miner. The only observed behaviour was it repeatedly making the sleep syscall (so, doing nothing). However, as the botnet operator can update the binary at any time, this payload may simply be dormant, awaiting activation once the botnet has grown to a specific size.

The P2Pinfect malware makes use of a peer-to-peer botnet. Each infected server is treated as a node, which then connects to other infected servers. This allows the entire botnet to gossip with each other without using a centralised C2 server. It is assumed that commands are issued by propagating signed messages across the network.

The binary is launched with a list of comma separated IP and port pairs that is encrypted and then base64 encoded as its first argument. It will reach out to one of these servers to grab a copy of all of the following binaries:

The binary then registers itself with the other botnet peers given to it. It does this by sending an HTTP request to them on /ip, which returns the IP of the local host the malware is running on. The malware already attempts to fetch its IP from ipv4.icanhazip.com, however as this is a common TTP for malware, it is possible that this request may get blocked or spoofed, so it likely uses its other peers to check. This may also be used to validate that the peer is online. After this, it then establishes a TLS connection with each peer. It will then learn about more peers, connect to them, and keep up to date with network gossip.

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