Hello and welcome to the Tuesday, February 17th,

2026 edition of the Sands and at Storm Center's Stormcast.

My name is Johannes Ulrich, recording today from Jacksonville, Florida.

And this episode is brought you by the sands.edu under graduate certificate program in Applied Cybersecurity Security.

Xavier today took a look at, well, some of the Malber evolution over the last few years in particular when it comes to 32-bit

bit versus 64-bit malware. Backwards compatibility can always be a little bit sort of an innovation hurdle in the sense

that, well, if it still works, why change it?

And that has been very true for malware in that most Malware has for many years now been 32-bit,

even though after 64-bit systems have become sort of common available and

pretty much the default. But what Xavier noted was that lately, there is about an even split

between 64-bit and 32-bit matter. So it looks like there's a little bit of tipping point happening here

where we will have more 64-bit Malver than 32-bit. A little bit about methodology here. Xavi used

Malver Bazaar. Malver Bazaar offers a real nice sort of downloadable Malver repository with daily files and Xavier looked at a terabyte sort of downloadable malware repository with daily files,

and Xavier looked at a terabyte worth of compressed malware

in order to compile the statistics.

So it should be pretty good here and cover a pretty good percentage of the malware ecosystem.

And when I've mentioned before that password managers are pretty much must that you have to

implement these days.

The problem being that pretty much all of the big password managers, they opt for a cloud-based

synchronization scheme in part, well, for economic reasons to be able to

charge subscription fees. But the problem now becomes, well, how secure are those keys in the

cloud? And of course, there's no lot of transparency as to how these keys are exactly stored.

...