 Welcome to Ask an Analyst. I invited Sarah and Fabian for today. Welcome. Hello. Hello. So maybe we should start with introducing ourselves. So Fabian, would you like to start? Okay, so my name is Fabian Wurzer and I am working for the antivirus company MCsoft. I am pretty much activist. Well, sorry, I am their current CTO and I'm mostly responsible for all the malware research and the core technology side of business pretty much. Hey, I'm Sarah, also known as Toffee or Polo Toffee. I also work at MCsoft and I do the kind of run to my side of things. Yeah, my name is Carson and I work at Gdata. I'm mostly responsible for writing signature detection. So the ransomware thing is also something I specialize in, but my main responsibility is writing detection signatures. All right, let's start with the questions that you send us and we decided that we had got a lot of questions. So we decided that we divide them into categories and make three parts out of it. And today we will start with the personal questions. So we get to know each other. And yeah, let's see. Aura and Kathleen asks, where does your love for polar bears come from? And how did this polar bear obsession start? So maybe you can say something about that, Sarah. Well, it originally started when I got a polar bear onesie for Christmas and I happened to share a picture of me in it and then it kind of went from there. People started calling me polar bear and I kind of adopted it as like avatar or my personality. Yeah, she really is a polar bear now. I mean, for all intents and purposes. Yeah, I'm pretty much what she said. She shared like a picture while we have like an IRC channel where we hang out with a whole bunch of people of bleeping computer and a couple of other places. And yeah, she just happened to share a picture of her there and everybody thought it was cute and adorable. So everybody started calling her a little polar bear. Is it correct that your avatars were made by an artist who created those as a gift? Yes, that's correct. Essentially, a whole bunch of ransomware victims that we helped over the time offered to either donate money or just do stuff for us in return because they were thankful. And especially when it comes to money, we usually reject those offers mostly because we prefer people put their money into a proper backup solution than just donating money to us. But in some cases, especially artists offered to do like avatars or pictures of us. Well, not offers but for us. And the avatars that Seren and I both use are the result of one artist in particular who offered to do like little cartoons of us in return for us helping him. So yeah, that's where those neat little avatars come from. Those are great gifts from people. Yeah, what are your hobbies outside of work? Maybe Fabian, you can go on. For me, my work pretty much is my hobby. So that's probably also why I kind of over indulge in it and overwork a little bit. I'm kind of a workaholic because I have like a kind of addictive personality and I really enjoy it. Well, if I really enjoy doing something that I will do it over and over again and in excessive amounts. So yeah, other than work it's like mostly games, tabletop games, stuff like that. I'm not really like a person that likes to go outside and yeah. As for me, I volunteer on the pen computer where I teach students kind of malware removal. Occasionally help out on the malware and looks form and generally more often on the ransomware forum. Other than that, I also enjoy reading, baking, which I do quite often and also like Fabian. I also enjoy tabletop games. Well, I like painting. I paint acrylics and the avatars show some of my paintings. So those are actually self-portraits of me with the hedgehogs. Yeah, other than that, I also like playing computer games and I love playing pen and paper role-playing games. But yeah, you see, I also mostly stay at home with my hobbies. I guess it's kind of a computer science thing. I mean, it's not a requirement, but I think it's kind of helpful. Especially if you could run over. Yeah, yeah, like the last time I went outside and well, not the last time I went outside, but the last time I crossed a zebra crossing a car hit me. So outside and I don't die very well. And that's why he doesn't like to go outside anymore or to begin with, I guess. Yeah, to begin with. Because I know there are ransomware authors out there who want to run me over with their cars. So when did you get interested in Melvier? At which age and why? Sarah. For me, I think it was about when I was 13 or 14. I happened to stumble across the sleeping computer. And as I mentioned before, they kind of have like a log forum where they like remove malware and addware from people's computers. So you have to like train to do that. So I decided I was going to take part in the training because I had some free time and I thought it'd be interesting. And that's kind of where it went, like grew from. For me, I was, I think about 10 or 11 years old. And back then, in the old days, there wasn't really an internet. So if you wanted to get like the newest game, which of course you copied from your friends and not bought it because games were extremely expensive back then. But anyway, you copied them from your friends and you usually did that on floppy disks, which, as we all know, are read and write mediums. So that means you often got computer viruses that way. And I got pretty much infected with tequila back then. And since antiviruses were kind of difficult to come by, I somehow had to remove it myself. So I took it apart and like figured out how to clean my files without a proper antivirus. And after that, I just went into the local library and they had actually books about computer viruses there. And I kind of got them all and read them and started collecting viruses and stuff like that. So, yeah, that's how I started out pretty much. Well, unlike you, I started much, much later to get interested in this field. I was interested in computer science long before that. But when it comes to malware, I started getting interested when I was 28 or 29 years old. That was three to four years ago. And I read Peter Zaw's book, The Art of Computer Virus Research and Defense. And I really loved it and I loved that how these viruses can evolve like biological viruses. And yeah, I started to write a parser for portable executable files. And the most interesting portable executable files were malware. So that's how I got interested in it. Yeah, what other questions do we have? Daniel, Daniel asked a question that a lot of people liked. So it's probably of interest for a lot of people. What color is the number five, Sarah? I've never really thought about that before. I'm not a very visual person in most situations, but if I had to say it probably would be blue color. For me, five is definitely like an ugly color. Like really neon green, like slime and disgusting because I don't like the number five for some reason. But other than that, I don't really think of colors. Well, of numbers and colors. So I don't have synesthesia, I think it's called. I don't know. Yeah, synesthesia. So yeah, a very, very ugly and bright and neon green for me. Do you have any other kind of synesthesia, maybe? I don't really. I'm pretty sure I don't either. I believe that I am of the type of the associated synesthetic. So there are two types. There's the projector who can, who actually sees the number five in that color. If he, let's say, if he sees it on a paper or on the computer screen, it's also in that color. For me, it's not that way. So I just strongly associate colors with numbers and also with letters. And yeah, the number five is a light green for me. It does not help me with luck analysis. Daniel told me that for him, it helps him with analyzing logs. I guess he really is a projector and sees it that way. But for me, it just helps remembering things because I have this other association with it. And can imagine that, yeah. All right. Do you have any interest in any other IT field? Then it does not have to be security related. But yeah, do you have any interest in it? For me, which kind of comes with the territory is like cryptography and also machine learning. Since I am mostly a developer and not really a malware analyst or reverse engineer. It's also all that stuff that comes with the development aspect of computer science, which means like life cycles, different development techniques and stuff like that. I think that there really isn't like one part of IT that I absolutely dislike that I wouldn't mind getting into. The only parts that I don't really dabble in are all the hardware aspects of it like hardware design and stuff like that. I mean, I'm interested in hardware and the way a developer would like, how can I use it? How do the interfaces and the ports work and stuff like that? But I don't really, I'm not really into hardware design itself, probably because I'm just horribly clumsy and I would just destroy it. For me, I think it's mostly the cryptography, which is quite related to kind of security. But also learning about networking would be quite interesting. When I was still at the university, I really loved theoretical computer science. And I was kind of a weirdo for that because most of my fellow students hated it. It's very mathematical and you have to do proves, mathematical proves. And I guess, well, I don't know, I actually don't know why I like it so much, so I just do. And I took a job in, I was a student assistant, later a graduate assistant and I corrected the homeworks of the other students. So that's a subject I definitely had a lot of interest in. Other than that, also artificial intelligence. I think if I had not gone into the malware field, I might have started with artificial intelligence instead. Yeah, it's quite a big field at the moment. I'm looking for ways to implement it into pretty much everything. They are looking for ways to destroy humanity. Skynet is real people. Yes, chemtrails. Yes, all those chemtrails, oh my God. Illuminati. Here's a hard question for you. Do hackers really wear ski masks? Yeah, of course. Only in crappy TV shows or when it's really cold. He's ruining it. I think all of them do because otherwise you would see who it is, right? Yeah, exactly. You would know who they were. That's how they avoid law enforcement. Prosecution. I mean, it's that and using PayPal to pay for the DDoS stressors, right? Yeah, definitely. You're like a top packer if you use PayPal. Amazing. Okay, I have to remember that. Okay, and the last question from Frederiko. How is your Twitter handle pronounced and that was directed at me? And it isn't the first time that I got this question. It's pronounced stroppiger. Now you know it. All right. That's it for today. Do you have anything else to add? I don't really have anything to just looking forward to the next two segments, really. All right, then. Thank you for joining this interview. We see you later. Bye-bye. Bye.