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See you in Vegas. Hi and welcome to Malicious Life in collaboration with Cyberraven.

I'm Ren Levin.

On On August 20th, 2008, a Trojan was found running on a server located in South Korea.

It was named Gimmyv.a.

Gimmyvie was a rat, a remote access trojan which allowed its author control over the

infected machine. Rats are rather popular in the malware world of course,

but Gimme V was noteworthy for one reason.

It exploited a zero-day vulnerability in Windows operating systems.

Specifically, it targeted a vulnerability in a component called RPC-de-com, which allow programs running on two machines to communicate with one another.

RPC DCCOM was implemented on every PC running any version of Windows XP or earlier.

In 2008, this translated to around 800 million machines in total. And so when experts spotted Jimmy V on that South Korean server, it looked to be a ticking time bomb, a test run of sorts.

And the test was successful. In September 2008, Chinese malware distributors began selling toolkits for just $37 a pop that could help hackers exploit the newest RPC-decom vulnerability discovered by Jimmy V.

Word of the toolkit spread and demand among hackers worldwide grew so large that by October 26, its Chinese distributors

were made to give up the exploit code for free.

...