Hello and welcome to the Monday, February 17th, 2025 edition of the Science Internet Storm Center's Stormcast.

My name is Johannes Ulrich, and I'm recording from Jacksonville, Florida.

Well, we got a couple of diaries from this weekend to talk about, first one by Xavier,

about interesting Python matter that displays a blue screen of

death.

Well, actually, not the real one.

It's sort of a approximation simulation of one.

I'm not 100% sure why they're doing this.

A couple possible reasons are, first of all,

tricking the user into rebooting the system,

which sometimes could, for example, activate some payload.

Also, there is an 800 number listed on the boot screen,

on that blue screen.

I did call it earlier, and it went to some kind of depth collection agency.

Not really sure what is all about.

Could be that this used to be used by some kind of tech support scam as well,

or as Xavier suggests, maybe it's just a simple anti-debugging technique.

Well, in the second diary, Xavier is talking about issues with volatile IP addresses.

You hardly ever get a static IP address, in particular for any kind of consumer connection.

And even if you have a static IP address, let's say you co-locate a server,

you rent some kind of virtual server in a data center,

well, you're not going to hold on to this virtual server forever.

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