Introduction

When I first began my PhD, my advisor suggested I go through various malware source codes (released openly on the Internet) to compile, execute, understand, and document them for future use.

This inevitably paid off, in that it helped me more easily create ground-truth for my datasets and experiments …

Personal

• System

  • Laptop & Server OS: Debian GNU/Linux
  • Mobile OS: LineageOS

• Software/Service

  • Web browser: Brave Browser
  • Private email/calendar/drive/vpn/password manager: Proton
  • Private messaging: Signal
  • Multi-factor authentication: YubiKey
  • Writing papers: Overleaf
  • Creating figures: Inkscape
  • Paper organizer: Zotero
  • Download video/audio: yt-dlp
  • Genealogy: gramps
  • Tor: Tor Browser

Software …

Introduction

Neo4j is a graph database implementation. It's used for creating large graphs to efficiently create and query various relationships. For an explanation on the differences between graph databases and relational database (like MySQL and PostgreSQL), see https://neo4j.com/developer/graph-db-vs-rdbms/.

I required Neo4j for one of my projects …

Introduction

Protonmail captured my interest a few years ago as privacy-focused alternative to Gmail.

But one of the problems I faced was my dependence on Google's Contacts service which kept all of my contacts for me stored on my Android device. I wanted to move away from this as well …

This is a good website for lots of general cyber security datasets: http://www.secrepo.com/

Malware Samples:

• Large dataset: https://github.com/sophos/SOREL-20M
• Malware from 2010-today: https://www.vx-underground.org/

Gathering Data:

• Static features for PE malware classification: https://github.com/elastic/ember
• Dynamic features for clustering PE …