Felony Stupidity?
Did Pissboy try to spearphish me?
Earlier today published Pissboy Peril Progresses, wherein I mentioned that he’s going to be in collections soon. I happened to check my Talkwalker Alerts and look what just turned up:
Now Isn’t That SPECIAL.
I mention collections and *poof* there’s an article with a lede that indicates it has just what I would need - information on Pissboy’s assets.
Let’s have a look at some timestamps on events, eh?
Attention Conservation Notice:
Pissboy really is both desperate and stupid. Remember what I said about psychopaths and the visceral pleasure they get by lying? Something like this would never work on me, but it does seem like the sort of hare brained scheme he’d attempt. This will get pretty technical, it’s attribution work, so it’ll shift to something other than English pretty quickly.
Timeline & Passive Investigation:
The court decision became known at 2024-07-12-1901.
And this alert is a bit of a muddle - it hit my mailbox at 0727, but the timestamp shows 0930? Talkwalker is fast, but they don’t have a time machine - this post was likely published at 0630 my time, or 0830 in Pissville, where Pissboy lives.
What, exactly, is in this alert?
What do we know about asapland[.]com? It’s been around a while, seems current owner picked it up in March of 2020.
The domain went without SSL for a long time, then in early April it got a proper configuation. That will help with SEO.
I didn’t find a lot of inspiration in the BuiltWith report for asapland[.]com - tags sometimes reveal secrets. These don’t seem to tie to anything that matters.
Cloudflare hosting, Zoho for email, and it’s a cPanel system.
Direct Inspection:
You can only go just so far with the passive approach. I can think of several ways to examine the site without giving up a real IP address or risking a system compromise.
Use wget with torsocks and download the page.
Use urlscan.io to examine the hosting and see a live shot of the site.
Fire up Tor networking base TAILS Linux and just browse to it.
Use a Linux box with fail closed VPN if Tor exits are blocked.
But for the month of July I happen to have a very interesting alternative - I am beta testing Cloak for Sapper Labs, the makers of the Hunchly web investigation recorder I strongly recommend. This is not at all the standard stuff you’d see upon login, they’ve loaded me down with all sorts of fun things to try.
I chose the U.S. exit and this is what I found.
And looking a bit closer … this might be a nothingburger. This site does a LOT of puff pieces on random D listers like McGibney.
Conclusion:
I was a bit reactive here, because of the timing of the arrival, right on top of Pissboy Peril Progresses. But having actually skimmed the article, I think I can identify the author: ChatGPT. There is no way Pissboy would have approved a headline calling him a “Digital Vigilante”. That profile and the flood of other puff pieces are AI authored shlock, one glance from a native English speaker is all it took to determine that.
Have you been around long enough to have read Paranoia: Pathological or Professional? This is one of those times where I’m right on the line - July has been busy in a nerve wracking manner and this case has consumed a lot of the last decade of my life. I don’t regret the time spent on the steps I took, as it makes a nice attribution tradecraft article for here, but I snapped into digger mode the instant I saw the title. I’ve been having downtime, but I am still touchy.
I think maybe I should help my office assistant into her jog bra and then we’ll head to a distant marina to check out another boat.