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The Strange Disappearance of Dancho Danchev
rudy_wayne writes "ZDNet is reporting that Zero Day blogger and malware researcher Dancho Danchev has gone missing since August of last year. Dancho, who was relentless in his pursuit of cyber-criminals, last blogged here on August 18. His personal blog has not been updated since September 11, 2010. 'At ZDNet, we made multiple attempts to contact him, to no avail. Telephone numbers are going to Bulgarian language voicemails and our attempts to reach him via a snail mail address also came up empty. Just recently, a trusted member of the malware research community reached out to us to say he had received a troubling letter from Dancho on September 9, 2010, about the threat of persecution in Bulgaria.'"
What kind of 'trouble' requires him avoiding even public computers and telephones? I mean, are we talking US Government spy satellites? Aliens? Alter-Dimensional invaders?
... this really does sound like a case of paranoid schizophrenia. The business with the photo of the lighting transformer pretty much proves it. :(
Frankly, he'd have been better off being clubbed by mobsters and stuffed into the trunk of a car. I hope they find him before he does serious harm to himself or anyone else.
What a spooky summary. If "malware authors" kidnapped him, maybe we can find Chrome bugs and get a hefty pay out from Google?
Hmm, maybe he is doing some Jason Bourne stuff. Either that or he got arrested and is unable to make any phone calls or make outside contact with anybody. Option 2 sounds more like what happened.
The world is how you make it
Those guys don't normally disappear their enemies, bombs are more their style.
Everyone knows that disappearances only matter if the subject is an attractive, young, blond, female. Preferably from at least an upper middle class background.
Not just yet another less-than-stellar electrical installation? What exactly is supposedly suspiciously spooky about them?
The government installed a lighting fixture! Those bastards! Its dimmable too! Clearly they want him to have mood lighting so he can seduce women in his bathroom, and mate with them. They clearly want an army of Danchev's under government control. He can't use a phone or a computer because the government enrolled him in dozens of online dating sites and posted his phone number in his profile. It all makes sense!
Cyber Jihad blogs YOU
They need to toss this criminal in the slammer and then throw away the key !! Enough of these "malware research" asswipes !!
Some one apparently slipped a 100 herbal Viagra pills in his borscht.
I would not at all blame him... Just think of this this way. He has piid off one heck of a lot of East European bot net (read Russian Mafia) guys. And the crooked internet providers that they support.
What are his options? Go to the Bulgarian Police and hope they are not crooked?...not a good idea. Try to deal with the mob?...very unlikely. One of two things he is either dead already or in hiding. It is that simple. The governments of Eastern Europe are not in a financial position to fight organized crime and one place that organized crime is really into high tech is Eastern Europe. Tin foil hats be damned!
Anonymous Coward
But who would bug... a bathroom?
Who would prosecute a pro-western guy in a pro-western country?
I fear as if his own email points to a rather trivial explanation, that afflicts some people in the field of exact sciences...
As in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
Well at least try, who knows what method (if any) he may have used.
He seems to have been active on his twitter until the 20th of October:
http://twitter.com/danchodanchev
thus invalidating the September 9's menace hypothesis.
He may simply have found a new job, and lost interest in updating his blog, or he may be paranoid and is hiding himself, by stopping all his online activities.
Using Twitter is not really the best way to stay discreet and anonymous.
He found one of those girlfriends that everybody talks about.
At Ruxcon there was a speaker from the Aussie Feds talking about how real criminals don't have a problem hurting or killing people. If you have been in jail for 10 years for hurting someone in a robbery and your new cell mate tells you he is in there for making $50,000 in 20 minutes by hacking, guess what the old school criminal is going to look into when he gets out? Since he will have no skills, he will find a geek and try to convince them to help him make money using whatever persuasion techniques he knows which boils down to "do this or you get hurt"
He also mentioned that other officers have been asked about their overseas holidays by criminals in interrogation rooms.
His body's decomposing in my locker.
Maybe one of the cybercriminals he was chasing stole his identity and went into hiding
It's easy to forget how tenuous life can be in other countries, especially under his circumstances.
Maybe he found the secret to the digital world. He is making his own digital world.
you say you never heard of him, then you have proceeded to conclude a full psychological profile from guy's pictures in a linked in profile. 'he has crazy look'.
please explain the concept of 'crazy look' to us.
Read radical news here
that some of the posters jere may actually be Russion mob/Blugarian mob/Bulgarian police.
Remember the Aruban police/judiciary assisted van der Sloot. and Aruba is a lot more domesticated.then Bulgaria. All it takes is a few officials and the other officials not wanting to cross the "thin blue line" and the "thin blue line" is a lot thicker there then it is here.
Yes the guy sounds paranoid but to paraphrase Jim Butcher "Just because your paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face." It is entirely possible that someone may have been slipping small amounts of a pranoia inducing hallucinogen into his food.
In the US we don't find it hard to believe that a person threatening a billion dollar industry is attacvked and/or assassinated, why do we find it hard to believe of Bulgaria?
First you write of chinese bloggers, because it is not a free country/
Then you write of a bulgarian blogger, becuase it used to be russian (even now it is a part of the EU and NATO)
Then you write of a frech blogger because of "french military victories"
Then you dismiss a English blogger, because he does not use the Englisch language correct and he is at the other side of the ocean,
Then you let go of a Texan blogger, because of the texan patent enforcement and you did not like Bush.
And when they knock on your door.... there is no-one left to turn to...
Maybe he is just paranoid and disappeared himself. If you've read his blog over the years, he quite often mentions how hackers have singled him out.
I think I'm also lost. It could be that I've never existed since I don't have a blog nor do I have a twitter account. I was last spotted making a post on /.
*update*
I have now been seen logging into my Steam account and playing CS:S.
Looks like somebody needs to check their local news.
you had me at #!
probably dead.
you had me at #!
He emigrated to Brazil?
(Oh crap, now that's the world's best kept secret, um, blown.)
you had me at #!
I read the article. Why didn't they notify the police in Bulgaria?
If he is missing since months ago, why alert zdnet only now ?
All looks like a bad joke to me.
Or, as he worked once for an advertising agency, a stupid advertisement.
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He has been found according to this http://www.dnevnik.bg/tehnologii/2011/01/17/1026425_ekspertut_po_it_sigurnost_dancho_danchev_e_nastanen_v/