Caturday felid trifecta: Larry the Cat finally catches a mouse; the counties that have the most cats; cat meme helps catch a cyberhacking group; and lagniappe

We’re back with three Caturday items and a  bit of lagniappe.

First, Larry the Cat, the Chief Mouser of the Cabinet Office, has shirked his job, catching almost no nice after 15 years at 10 Downing Street.  But at least, at the ripe old age of 19, Larry has not only caught a mouse, but gobbled it up in front of the Prime Minister’s door. Click the headline to read the Times story:

Excerpt:

Once accused of shirking responsibility, Downing Street’s chief mouser has finally lived up to his title.

While Sir Keir Starmer reassured the British public that he would seek to mitigate the rising cost of living during a prime ministerial speech on Wednesday, Larry the cat was making a precision kill.

Larry killed the ill-fated rodent in the courtyard of the Foreign Office, dragged it across the street and ate it by No 10’s door.

The moment was captured by GB News’s political editor, Christopher Hope, who insisted: “This is not an April fool.” Video showed Larry toying with the mouse, pawing it, tossing it in the air and clasping it in his jaws.

. . .[Larry] was recruited in 2011 to deal with a rodent problem after a BBC camera tracked a rat outside No 10.

Battersea Dogs & Cats Home recommended Larry as “a cat who enjoys attention” but was also “a bit of a bruiser” with excellent mousing skills — skills that have finally seen the light of day.

According to the Independent, this grisly affair happened during a Keir Starmer press conference about the Iran war.

Here’s a video (WARNING: RODENT DEATH)

More from the Times:

Early in his tenure, he was given the nickname “Lazy Larry” for his penchant for napping. The Cabinet Office was forced to defend his mousing as being in the “tactical planning stage”.

Yet by June 2011, David Cameron, then prime minister, boasted that Larry had “got three mice — verifiable”.

Since the untimely death of his nemesis, Palmerston, the Foreign Office cat who resigned from his post in 2020, Larry has now outlasted one chief mouser, five prime ministers and is staring down his sixth.

You go, Larry! Show ’em that we old geezers have still got it!

********************

From VGraphs. Yes, populous countries have more cats, but it’s not in strict proportion to their human populations.  for example, China’s population of 1.4 billion is about four times that of the U.S., but the U.S. has 27% more cats.  You can do the math for the rest.

**************************

From the WSJ: a computer whiz managed to infiltrate himself into a serious hacking group to plug the leaks—using a cat meme!

An excerpt 9my bolding):

Sitting in his dorm room at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Benjamin Brundage was closing in on a mystery that had even seasoned internet investigators baffled. A cat meme helped him crack the case.

A growing network of hacked devices was launching the biggest cyberattacks ever seen on the internet. It had become the most powerful cyberweapon ever assembled, large enough to knock a state or even a small country offline. Investigators didn’t know exactly who had built it—or how.

Brundage had been following the attacks, too—and, in between classes, was conducting his own investigation. In September, the college senior started messaging online with an anonymous user who seemed to have insider knowledge.

As they chatted on Discord, a platform favored by videogamers, Brundage was eager to get more information, but he didn’t want to come off as too serious and shut down the conversation. So every now and then he’d send a funny GIF to lighten the mood. Brundage was fluent in the memes, jokes and technical jargon popular with young gamers and hackers who are extremely online.

“It was a bit of just asking over and over again and then like being a bit unserious,” said Brundage.

At one point, he asked for some technical details. He followed up with the cat meme: a six-second clip that showed a hand adjusting a necktie on a fluffy gray cat.

Brundage didn’t expect it to work, but he got the information. “It took me by surprise,” he said.

Eventually the leaker hinted there was a new vulnerability on the internet. Brundage, who is 22, would learn it threatened tens of millions of consumers and as much as a quarter of the world’s corporations. As he unraveled the mystery, he impressed veteran researchers with his findings—including federal law enforcement, which took action against the network two weeks ago.

Here’s the cat meme that Brundage used.  It’s a Trojan Kitty!

And the nefarious proxy network he took down:

Three times a year, several hundred of the techies who keep North America’s internet running gather to talk shop. Last June they met at a conference in Denver hosted by the North American Network Operators’ Group.

One major topic was a fast-growing and often legally dubious business known as residential proxy networks. Dozens of companies around the world run such networks, which are made up of consumer devices like phones, computers and video players.

These “res proxy” companies rent out access to internet connections on the devices to customers who want to look like they’re surfing the internet from a genuine home address.

That kind of access is useful for people who want privacy or for companies that want to masquerade as regular people to test out internet features for particular regions or scrape the web for data (say, a shopping price-comparison site). AI companies use the networks to get around blocks on automated traffic so they can gather large amounts of data to train their models.

Then there are the customers who want to hide their identity while engaging in ticket scalping, bank fraud, bomb threats, stalking, child exploitation, hacking or espionage.

Some device owners willingly sign up to be on these networks so they can make a few dollars a month, but most have no idea they’re connected to one.

. . .Brundage had identified 11 of the largest residential proxy companies, including Ipidea, that were vulnerable to the bug, and began drafting emails to them explaining how to fix the problem.

But first, he had to complete his finals.

The day after his last test, on Dec. 17, Brundage sent out the emails. Five days later, he got on a plane to fly to Mexico for Christmas vacation, where he was sick with the flu almost the entire time. Christmas came and went without a DDoS disaster.

On the 26th, Brundage got an email from Ipidea apologizing. His email had gone into a spam folder, but they were fixing the problem.

The Ipidea spokeswoman previously told the Journal the company “once adopted relatively aggressive market expansion strategies,” but later tightened up its business practices.

A week later, security blogger Brian Krebs published a story highlighting Brundage’s research on Kimwolf’s origin. Within hours, Renée Burton, the head of threat intelligence at networking company Infoblox, was texting Brundage. She was astonished to discover that a quarter of her corporate clients had been infected with the Kimwolf software.

The hackers hadn’t only unlocked a back door into millions of home networks—they had also created a way to break into thousands of corporations. A more sophisticated hacker could have stolen corporate secrets, installed ransomware or created a back door to return to the network, Brundage said.

All solved because of a tie-wearing kitty!

*********************

Lagniappe: This is me on vacation (from Cats Doing Cat Stuff):

 

h/t: Pyers, Gregory