Just wanted to say hello and thanks. I lost many nights sleep in the 90s due to +fravia. I also recall a mirror at woodmann.com I think (it was more than 10 years ago). It seemed the site(s) were not updated after a certain point and I moved on. I never let go of the things I had learned there and never stopped trying to learn more. It paid off in the sense that I have a full time job where I use windbg daily, have a full license for IDA pro, and even get paid to RE certain software for troubleshooting purposes. When I saw that +fravia died I felt a loss that my friends and family could not relate to. The other night I was thinking about it again and came upon this site once more. I can only assume from what I read that this is the same woodmann from back in the day. So thanks woodmann. We have never spoke but these things occupy a large part of my head. I was too ignorant to contribute 15 years ago. Hopefully that has changed.

Hi whitey,

Glad to have you back.

We have never spoken but it does not matter.
What matters is you came back.

Hopefully you will share your experiences in all
things concerning RCE and and how you found
a job in this field.

Thanks, Woodmann
(The same one. Not the pron guy)

Well, I got transferred to IT department after I made a web page in the early 90s for a small company I was working for. For the next 5 years I was a developer. Mostly FoxPro. That’s when I found all the RCE sites. I thought I knew everything about programming even though I used a language that didn't use pointers or manage memory. I was mistaken.

Fast forward many years and I have been all over IT in the software realm. Currently I use IDA and other reversing tools to fix production software issues mostly with unsupported 3rd party code. I am in the debugger most of the day trying to fix one bug or another. I have a solid understanding of the workings of windows and software. I can patch EXEs, modify software behavior at runtime with debugger, and analyze crash dumps and such. I do a lot with .net but I don’t even count that as reversing because you can just look at the source code for any .net app with free tools. So I don't work in security or anything and all my reversing involves programs that do not try and protect themselves. That’s really why I'm here. I think I finally have all the fundamentals in order. I just need to go to the next level and put some effort into reversing malware and other things that try not to be reversed.

This leads into the post I’m about to make on the malware thread…