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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.'"
Not exactly. It's eastern Europe. It's corrupt as hell and cybercrime is a big business. Who's to say that the authorities aren't being bribed to go after this guy? It could well be paranoid ranting, but this guy is in a pretty shitty country where the cops are far, far more corrupt than the ones in the western world.
It's easy to tell scary tales for foreign countries, but I'm here in Bulgaria and I can tell you that it's actually a normal country. We do have a higher rate of corruption, that is insufficient to outright claim cops acting autonomously disappear people on a regular basis in here.
Some things in Danchev's email don't compute for me. He says he's prosecuted for his clearly pro-western bias. Ever since the USSR collapse, this country has had a pro-western bias itself. We're in NATO and EU for crying out loud. The fixtures photos are unfortunately not a very clear message of what he intended. Surely if he wanted to show us bugs he'd take more specific photos.
Either ZDNet has decided to withhold some of the information they have, which is understandable, or Danchev was under stress when sending these emails, which is very likely to be assumed. Unfortunately the reason for this stress may range as wildly as from a governmental hunt to possible mental issues.
If he ever stepped on someone's interests, I doubt it'd be the government as a whole, more a specific organized group that was hurt by his work or has been "asking" persistently for his "help". Which doesn't match his description of the events.
So we're left speculating or mocking the guy, or insulting his country, with a clue on what's going on. Sometimes, if you have nothing to say, it's best to say nothing.
Swedish girls.
Home of The Suki Series
I like to reward folks for being funny.
While that's very considerate of you, a funny post marked as 'Informative' is more than likely to get subsequently modded down; messages with comedic substance tend to come across as wholly incorrect assertions when read from sources being represented as useful information.
Clearly you've never visited the city of New Orleans or the state of Illinois.
We here in the US don't claim them anymore. New Orleans is now part of Hatti, and most of Illinois is a micronation.
This is slashdot, they tell the same scary stories about he US, UK and recently even Sweden.
Ah, yes, Sweden, where shoplifting is referred to as "rape of inventory," wire fraud is defined as "rape of database," armed robbers are charged with "rape of wallet," and jaywalking is known as "rape of traffic."
Kinda reminds me of the kier/cha0 story which you can read here - Quite scary stuff. There are other events like this out there as well involving organised criminals kidnapping people who started investigating their links with malware and botnets.
And you can be arrested for being a dickhead unless you wear a condom as a hat.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.