Thank you so much for being here today for this NCAR Explorer Series Conversations Event, streaming live from our homes to yours. My name is Dr. Dan Zietlow, and I work in education and outreach here at the National Center for Atmospheric Research or NCAR, which is a world-leading organization dedicated to understanding our system science. And that includes our atmosphere, our weather, climate, the sun, and how all of these systems impact our society. We've got a really great event planned for today with Dr. Michael Mills, joining us from the Atmospheric Chemistry Observations and Modeling Lab, or simply ACOM. And we're going to chat all about volcanoes, especially volcanic eruptions and how those eruptions can actually impact our global climate. And this is definitely a timely topic, not only because today actually is 41 years since the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, but we're also hearing a lot about volcanic activity all over the world, including Iceland, as well as the recent eruption of last week, the area that's really impacted St. Considium and Grenadines. So throughout this event, you can ask Dr. Mills questions and engage with us through interactive polls using Slido. So if you scroll down this webpage just a little bit, right below where you see the video of this webcast, you can actually join Slido and answer some of the polls we currently have available, particularly the word cloud on what you think of when you hear the word volcano, because we're going to get to that pretty soon. I also just want to quickly note that this conversation is being recorded and we will share it out through our NCAR Explorer Series website. Now, before we check in and see your thoughts on our word cloud, let's meet Dr. Michael Mills. So Mike, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do here at NCAR? Hi Dan, thanks for that. I, as you said, work in atmospheric chemistry and I work on global climate models that have a lot of chemistry that affects everything from the Earth's surface all the way up to the edge of space. Specifically, I do modeling of processes that follow volcanic eruptions that affect our stratosphere and the ozone layer and the climate. I've also done research on some related issues like nuclear winter and how particles from smokes after a nuclear war could lead to effects on our climate as well as things like geoengineering. That's awesome. And that's one of the neat things I've noticed about a lot of stuff that you do is there's so many different applications even though it's kind of broadly under the umbrella of, you know, how does our atmosphere impact global climate? Yeah, it's in it. Largely my work is at the interface of particles suspended in the atmosphere and the Earth's system. Awesome. Well, before we go any further because I know we have lots to talk about today, let's go ahead and take a look at the responses to our work cloud. So Paul and Aliyah, would you be able to share that work cloud for us? All right, so it looks like the demo one answer that our audience thinks about when they hear the word volcano is blada, which I think is totally fair. I also am seeing eruptions, fire, atmosphere, geology, red lot of smoke, Mount Vesuvius, volcano, beauty, power, danger, aerosols, my youngest daughter. I'd be curious to learn more about that one. What else do we have? Explosive Iceland, my job. That's a great one. We must have a volcanologist on board with today. Source of damaging lava flows and sulfur. Cool, so yeah. So hearing all of that from our audience, I'm super curious, Mike, like how did you get interested in what you do? Well, I mean, first of all, who doesn't love a good volcanic eruption? And as you mentioned, on this day in 1980, a little mountain in Southern Washington state erupted called St. Helens. And it basically covered a good part of the Pacific Northwest in ash. And I was 12 years old when that happened. So great age to be really interested in that. But in terms of my professional career, it was later when I was working here in Boulder in graduate school with my PhD advisor, Dr. Susan Solomon, who I'll talk about a bit today. And she had really done a lot of groundbreaking work on ozone loss and the ozone hole over Antarctica. And I was trying to figure out what to do my PhD thesis on when this volcano erupted in the Philippines in June of 1991.  And so it had an effect on our climate. It also had an effect on the ozone layer. And I started working on modeling that in the computer models at that time. And I've been working on things like that ever since. I also wanted to show my first slide here, which is a, let's see, share my screen. This is a beautiful animation of a series of images taken by an astronaut on the International Space Station in June 12th, 2009. This is Serachev Peak on an island in the Coral Islands between Russia and Japan. And you can see all sorts of things going on here. All that gray stuff is the ash that you think about with Mount St. Helens. There is some lava action going on down the flanks of the volcano. That's called a pyroclastic flow. There's some water vapor condensing in the cloud there as well. And this eruption was important as well to the climate and the ozone in that it also put sulfur gases into the stratosphere. And as I'll talk about, that has global impacts. That's a really cool invention, I gotta say. That's pretty awesome to see. And I think it goes back to a couple of the things our audience was saying with the work slide. You know that volcanoes are beautiful and they're also kind of dangerous and scary at the same time. Now, I know as we were talking kind of before this event that you have a very interesting story to tell about this summer, or I should say the year that there wasn't actually a summer. So what was up with that? This was early in the 19th century. It was, the year was 1816. It was one year after the Battle of Waterloo. So Europe was recovering from Napoleonic Wars and actually in 1815, the year before the year went out of summer, about the same time as Waterloo was happening, a volcano was erupting all the way around the other side of the world in Indonesia. And it may have been the most explosive volcanic eruption of the last 10,000 years. It's called Mount Tambora. It happened on an island where there were about 12,000 inhabitants of which only 26 survived in surrounding area and other islands, the eruption and earthquake. And there's also tsunamis killed about 90,000 people and all around the area, about 200 miles around the volcano experience about three days of total darkness because of all the material in the atmosphere blocking out the sun's rays. And then on the other side of the world, here we are in Connecticut and New England and the United States, the Northeast. This is a look at the mean June temperatures in Connecticut over the period from 1790 to the year 1860. And we see this outlier here starting in 1816. That's the year without a summer when the mean temperatures really dropped. And again, in 1817, they were still pretty cold. And this is a quote from a great book about the eruption by Gil and Darcy Wood. It's called Tambora, the eruption that changed the world. He says, for three years following Tambora's explosion to be alive almost anywhere in the world meant to be hungry. In New England, 1816 was nicknamed the year without a summer or 1800 and froze to death. Germans called 1817 the year of the beggar. Across the globe, harvest, perish and frost and drought or were washed away by flooding rains. Villagers in Vermont survived on porcupine and boiled nettles while peasants of Yunnan China sucked on white clay. Summer tourists traveling in France mistook beggars crowding the roads for armies on the March. And another interesting story is that this, the same summer there were a group of poets and writers, Percy Shelley and his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and their friend Lord Byron, they went to Switzerland for the summer and they had such dismal weather there that they entertained each other by telling ghost stories. And this is how Mary Shelley started ended up writing the book, Frankenstein. So here's another effect of the year without a summer in New England. We see us the snow line in June of 1816. We don't usually have snow in the summer in New England. So it went all the way down to the southern border of Vermont there. So that's pretty severe.  The growing season was greatly shortened. This is the number of days that you can grow between frosts, it was shorter in 1816 than any other year in the several decades before and after. And as a result, the prices of staple crops really spiked. Wheat and corn went up. On the other hand, a lot of livestock had to be slaughtered to avoid starvation. So in fact, prices of meat fell in many cases. There was famine in Europe and in India. There were riots in France. As I said, Europe was still recovering from the Napoleonic Wars. People started leaving New England. This is the rate of emigration, the number of people leaving Vermont spiking in the year 1816. In fact, Vermont's population growth was set back by seven years and the population went down by 8%. And as people started moving to what they call the West, what we now call the Midwest, it spurred the creation of the Erie Canal which connected the Hudson River to the Great Lakes. And that started in 1817 to improve transportation. We also had the first cholera pandemic following this eruption which started in India in 1817. But this is the first time that cholera spread outside of India. And it's been linked to changes in the monsoon that the subcontinent really relies on for food. In the time when it's normally wet, it was dry. And when the time when it was normally dry, it was wet. And this has been linked to the spread of this disease into a pandemic possibly. I mean, for us at NCAR, one of the things we're always thinking about is the Earth system, right? Like how is everything connected to one another? And this is all just the great examples of how one volcanic eruption can cause all of these things, including writing a book about Frankenstein. It's interesting too, I think. For me, I remember the first time I kind of had this realization of how I can be affected by a volcano, even if I don't live anywhere near one. I was living down in New Zealand at the time, actually, when the big volcanic eruption in Chile happened and it like shut down all the air traffic in the Southern Hemisphere. I mean, just kind of stranded there for a little bit. I was like, oh wow, like we're nowhere near this eruption. And yet it's an emptiness, you know, thousands of kilometers away. Was that in 2015 or 2011? 2011, yeah. Yeah. There were a couple of eruptions in Chile both those years. And my last slide today, I will look at how they both affected the ozone hole in Antarctica. Oh, great. I'll be fun to get to. So I don't see any questions yet. So if you're out there in cyberspace listening, definitely ask questions all throughout. We're gonna be taking them as they come in. So now one thing that we're definitely gonna talk about today is what obviously happens after a volcanic eruption. So we have this eruption that happens. There's all this particulate matter and gases spewing out. So how does that then interact with our atmosphere and how can that then actually change our global climate? Oh, I'm glad you asked. I have this little cartoon, animated cartoon from the New York Times, which illustrates some of the processes and simplified form here. We talked about the ash that comes out of a volcano, but the ash actually doesn't last very long in the atmosphere. It doesn't get very high and it's pretty heavy and dense. Tends to fall out or get rained out within a few weeks at longest. But there's another component of volcanic eruptions that can affect the climate for several years. And usually that is a gas called sulfur dioxide, which if it gets high enough in the atmosphere, it is immune to rain out. It gets into the stratosphere. And we'll talk about that later. But this gas then reacts and it forms little tiny and shiny particles of sulfuric acid and water, which can grow. And these particles can stay up in the stratosphere for three years, sometimes longer. And while they're up there, they're reflecting sunlight back into space so that sunlight doesn't get to the surface. And that results in the surface of the earth being cooler for a few years after eruptions like that. And this is a little bit more detail in what I'm talking about, where we have the sun on the upper left and it's putting out the sunlight in the visible and in the ultraviolet. That's what we call shortwave radiation. And those wavelengths get reflected back out into space as well as some of it gets scattered. And so often after a big eruption, you can see really beautiful sunsets of striking colors as well. And there are other effects of these particles, which we call aerosols, aerosol particles are the little tiny, shiny droplets that are suspended in the air. And among them is they can absorb some of the earth's heat as it's escaping into space. And that doesn't generally warm the surface, but it can heat up things in the stratosphere. So this is some of the chemical processes we're talking about. There's a two gas coming out of the volcano and following these chemical reactions to form this H2SO4, which is sulfuric acid gas. And then it gets together with water molecules in the atmosphere to form these particles in what we call nucleation or gas to particle conversion. And then that attracts more water and sulfuric acid molecules and they grow by what's called condensation. They can also run into each other and collide with coagulation. And then when they get big enough, they start falling through the air and getting removed. And these are the processes that we include in our, or you see on the bottom, the whole atmosphere community climate model or WACM, which is this model I talked about earlier, which includes chemical processes all the way from the surface of the earth up to the edge of space. That's pretty cool. Yeah, and for everybody, we're gonna talk a little bit more about kind of models and how we use them a little bit later. So again, we're waiting for a couple more questions to come in. So maybe we'll kind of move on to the next topic as we let some more questions come in. But there are heaps of volcanoes all over the world. We got up and down the West coast of the Americas to Alaska, Japan. So all these volcanoes are gonna be behaving differently. They all are gonna have different compositions in their eruptions when they erupt. So what are some of the ways that scientists can actually study all these different volcanoes and the different components of it? And then how specifically do you study the volcanoes for your own work? Well, we have a lot of tools now for observing the effects of volcanic eruptions.  We have good satellites that can measure the sulfur dioxide SO2 gas emitted by eruptions. And here's an observation from Mount Pinatubo, not of the gas, but of the actual aerosol from Mount Pinatubo and in the upper left, we see what's called the non-volcanic stratospheric aerosol layer, which is created by things other than volcanic eruptions. But then in the upper right, when Pinatubo erupts in the Philippines, it starts spreading throughout the tropics as the winds in the stratosphere take it around the earth. And then in the months following in the lower left, we see it starting to spread from the tropics towards the poles. And this is just the circulation of the earth stratosphere moving the aerosols until the entire globe gets covered in a layer of sulfate that's reflecting aerosol back into space seen in the lower right, which is about a year and a half after this eruption in the Philippines. But there are other ways that people measure volcanic effects. One way is to shoot a laser beam that's pulsed from the ground and measure the reflection of light coming back, that's called lidar. And that's a highly precise way of measuring where particles are in the atmosphere. You can get their altitude really accurately because we know the speed of light so well. And we even have satellites that have laser beams shooting down and doing the same thing. But what I do is not to observe these things but to put them into a climate model, which includes, it's a collaboration over decades of our community of atmospheric scientists and earth system scientists because this model is connected to not just the atmosphere but it also has an ocean model, a land model, even sea ice and land ice. And my small role in this model, one of them is to put the processes that convert volcanic eruptions into these aerosols and how they affect the radiation, the climate and also the interactions with the chemistry that affect the earth's ozone layer. So this is a simulation from the whole atmosphere community climate model or WACM of the Mount Pinatubo eruption in June 15th, 1991. There you see it spreading out in the tropics and then it's followed two months later by this eruption in Southern Chile, which puts some stuff in, but now you're starting to see it spreading out from the tropics into the poles. And as it's doing that, this is a measure of the total amount of particles in the stratosphere, it starts thinning out and getting removed in the years, the months and years following the eruption. We're still just a little over a year after the eruption here, but we have a definitely an aerosol covered planet. And in fact, many of us who were around then remember the beautiful sunsets that we saw. And in fact, the following year, I was very lucky that my PhD advisor Susan Solomon sent me down to Antarctica and I got to measure some of the impacts that this eruption was still having on the ozone layer there. That was another animation, just showing some smaller volcanic eruptions. And here's one in 2008 that happened off of Alaska. And we see it doesn't move down to the tropics because of the circulation in the atmosphere. When an eruption happens near the pole, it tends to stay in that hemisphere. Whereas here in 2011, we have three different eruptions happening at three different latitudes and spreading things around. Here's another one in the tropics in 2014 and it starts spreading mostly to the southern hemisphere. And then finally in 2015, there's this Kalbuco eruption in Chile, which is pretty far south in the southern hemisphere. And this has been linked to the, that year there was a record large ozone hole over Antarctica. And it's really not the fault of the volcano, but it's the interaction of these particles with the chlorine that we've pumped up into the stratosphere from man-made sources. And we'll talk about that a bit later in the talk. Cool. So here we're looking at kind of small to moderate eruptions. One of the questions that I see in the chat right now, and actually one question I get a lot as a geologist from friends of mine is about the Yellowstone Supervolcano. So Ian is wondering, how significant is or was the Yellowstone Supervolcano? I'm gonna interpret that maybe as like, if and when the Yellowstone Supervolcano explodes, like how significant of an impact is that gonna have on our atmosphere and global climate? The Yellowstone is, as the person said, a supervolcano that is what we call a hot spot underneath in the Earth's mantle, which punches through the crust. And it's been moving over millions of years as the North America's actually been moving over it. So it used to be out towards the Pacific Ocean and North America has been moving westward and now it's in Wyoming. And over that period of millions of years, it's erupted several times, but the last one was hundreds of thousands of years ago. And I think it's erupted about three times and those were truly catastrophic events. And if something of that size were to happen, now it would produce a very dramatic cooling, much like a perhaps a global thermonuclear war, putting a bunch of smoke up into the atmosphere. And so when you're trying to answer a question like that, first of all, have to rely on indirect observations because nobody was around when those eruptions happened. So we have to look at what happened to life on Earth. And we have proxies of temperature in tree rings and also ice cores and other measures. And when we're building a computer model to simulate volcanic eruptions, we can't be sure that they're going to get everything right because we don't have the same kinds of observations for an eruption of that size. But we're pretty sure it would lead to probably freezing temperatures every month of the year for several years and throughout the globe. And that could wipe out humanity and a good portion of life on Earth. And I'm not happy now, let's take the next question. So there's a couple of great questions in here that maybe we'll get to a little bit later because we're going to talk a little bit more about the gases that are kind of being erupted and circulating. But Mark is wondering, did people understand at the time of the 1816 eruption that the cooling and lack of sunlight was due to a volcanic eruption? That's a great question, thanks. They did not, in fact. In fact, that was in 1815 and 1816 was the cooling. That was well before we had global communications. But there was a much more famous eruption that happened in 1883 called Krakatau or Krakatoa. And that was perhaps the first global news event because it happened after telegraph wires had been strung around the world. And so people knew that an eruption had happened in Indonesia. But back in 1815, 1816, people had no idea why they were freezing together in New England and Europe. Yeah, which is always interesting when you don't really have those observations to put two and two together. Cool, so we'll take one more question because this is also related to the 1816 eruption and then we'll kind of move on. But Chris is wondering, as compared to the eruption in the 1816, what was the comparative power of the eruption of the Lagerida caldera in Colorado and what were its worldwide effects? Well, that's a great question. So as I mentioned, the Tambora eruption in 1815 was perhaps the most explosive of the last 10,000 years. Lagerida happened well before that a few hundred thousand years ago in Colorado. You can go to the Wheeler Geologic Area in Colorado if you're willing to hike it in or you've got a good four-wheel drive. And it's really an amazing, just formation of rock that's made out of the ash from this volcano and it all looks like dribble castles because there was a huge layer of ash that covered a wide area. And so that was an even bigger eruption and we can't be sure of how much sulfur was in it. Some volcanoes put out a lot of ash without putting out sulfur like Mount St. Helens, although Mount St. Helens caused a lot of damage in the US because of the ash. It didn't have very much sulfur to affect the global climate. But if we go back for the last several hundred thousand years, we do have some measurements from ice cores drilling down a mile or two through the ice in Antarctica and Greenland. And we can actually measure sulfur spikes in the gas bubbles that are trapped in the layers of ice that get put down each year there to give us some measure. So I know that Lagarita had a lot more energy than Tambora or anything we've seen in the last few thousand years. I don't know exactly how much impact it had on the climate and for how long because we don't have measurements of the sulfur from back then. That's great. Thanks for all that info. So moving into kind of the next part of our conversation, we do have, I just want to note for the audience, we do have a poll question coming up. So if you haven't answered that quite yet, definitely head into Slido to answer the poll question about since the 1800s, which component of volcanic eruptions has had the largest impact on global temperatures. And we'll check on that just in a little bit. But earlier we were talking about how volcanic eruptions, obviously affect the global climate and specifically how they can cool temperatures. So from some of the work that you've been doing, what are some of the things that you are seeing about how surface temperatures are changing after a volcanic eruption? So let me just show this. This is a figure that we published a few years ago from our simulations using the WACM model I mentioned. And what this shows, if you just look at the black line here, this is what we call the forcing or how the volcano has decreased the amount of energy coming to the surface. These are volcanoes from 1980 till 2015. And so where this black line is dipping down, it's due to reduction in sunlight coming to the surface. And what happened in 1982 is this volcano erupted in Mexico called El Chichon. And that was in the tropics and it did spread some to the Southern Hemisphere. It had a bigger effect than the Northern Hemisphere. And then as I mentioned, 1991, we had Mount Pitatubo decreasing and these calculations in our model are validated from satellite observations which show the amount of energy going into and out of the Earth's atmosphere. And then after Mount Pitatubo erupted in the late 1990s, we have what we call a quiescent period when there weren't very many volcanic eruptions. There were a few small ones but they didn't have a big effect on the Earth's temperature. But since the year 2005, we've had a series of small to moderate magnitude inputs of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere from eruptions. And it's had some impact on the rate of warming. It slowed that down. In fact, using this model, we're able to compare the small forcing in the late 1990s and early 2000s from volcanoes to the forcing since, well, 2005 to 2015. And the numbers here just show we had three times as much cooling in that decade than we did in the late 90s from volcanoes. And if you compare that to the warming from carbon dioxide over the same periods, these eruptions offset about 30% of the warming over that period. And so they did, in fact, slow down global warming slightly. And that's shown in the next slide as well where the gray shaded area is a range of observations of the global average surface temperature where we've removed the effects of El Nino, which has a big effect and did the same thing with the different models. Now, the green model is one that doesn't include these recent eruptions since 2005. And it shows a bit too much warming compared to the observations. Whereas the black and the blue lines are calculations that include these eruptions and those do better in matching the observations and show that there was a slight reduction in global average temperature. It's only less than a 10th of a degree Celsius, but it was a significant offsetting of global warming. Yeah, it's super interesting. And again, just going back to that, how everything within the earth system is gonna impact something else within that earth system. So let's maybe check out that poll question. So Mike, if you go ahead and unshare your screen, so that way Paul and Aliyah can share theirs. So if we pop that poll question up, since the 1800s, which component of volcanic eruptions has had the largest impact on global temperatures? And our audience seems to overwhelmingly think sulfur dioxide. So Mike, could you give us a little more background on that? Yeah, a lot of people were paying attention. When we came up with this question, I asked to put in since the 1800s because there are different components to volcanic eruptions and they have effects on temperatures on different time scales. Sulfur dioxide, as I mentioned, leads to these aerosol particles that can cool the planet for three to five years. But if we're talking about into the deep past, what we call that paleoclimate, volcanoes over long time scales have been historically significant in affecting the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere very slowly over millions of years. And there've been periods in the deep past over a billion years ago when the earth was very cold and volcanic eruptions may have been part of warming the earth up to get us out of those conditions over a long period of time. But there's certainly a very slow process in changing carbon dioxide, and especially compared to what humans are producing from fossil fuel burning and industrial activity. Great, so there's a couple related questions that I see in the chat right now. Someone is wondering if sulfate aerosols are cooling the planet. Could we actually use the sulfate aerosols to help cool the earth and reduce global warming? This is an idea some people have had. And it has different names. The most frequently used is geoengineering. It's also called solar radiation management. And it's certainly a disturbing concept that we have messed up the earth's climate so badly that we're at a point where we need to mess it up some more in order to offset what we've done. And the problem is that putting sulfur into the stratosphere, as I said, it only lasts three to five years. When you're putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so about 50% of it goes into the ocean right away. And then a good portion of it will be removed over the next few centuries, but about 20% of it will still be there tens of thousands of years later. And so we're talking about geologic time scales and the carbon dioxide unless we can stop emitting it and perhaps we might even have to eventually figure out a way to pull it out of the atmosphere, which is gonna be very challenging. Then putting in particles is only a temporary solution. Now, some people say it could slow down the rate of change and allow adaptation and alleviate some suffering while you're working on technologies that would be carbon-free or that could actually remove carbon dioxide from the air. And that's a serious thing. I have worked on this issue and I went to a conference on climate engineering in Berlin and I actually met a woman from Bangladesh and she said to me that they're interested in geoengineering because even at the most ambitious target we have of keeping warming below one and a half or two degrees of Celsius that very populated parts of her country Bangladesh are gonna be underwater. And so this is thought of sometimes as something that needs to be researched as break glass in case of emergency type of situation. Yeah, there's definitely like you said a lot of research out there still and there's also some ethical questions we have to be asking ourselves as we kind of dive more into the area of geoengineering. Great, so there's a couple of questions related to what we're about to talk about next. So maybe let's talk a little bit about this before we take those questions. So one thing that we set up at the beginning here is that volcanic eruptions have an effect on stratospheric ozone. We just wanna distinguish between stratospheric ozone versus surface level ozone. And so what effect do volcanoes have on the stratospheric ozone and why should we care about that? Okay, so this is a little cartoon showing the different layers of the atmosphere. And down to the surface where we are is what we call the troposphere. And this is an area that's very unstable. You probably know that as you go up higher in altitude the atmosphere gets colder. That happens throughout the troposphere and if you have warm air below cold air oftentimes you get weather, air rising and there's also a lot more to it than that. But as you go up high enough you get to a point where the temperature of the atmosphere starts rising. That's shown by this red line. It's a graph where we have temperature on the horizontal and altitude on the vertical. So we see cooling up to the top of the troposphere to this boundary we call the tropopause. And then we get into what's called the stratosphere where it starts warming. And why is it warming? It's warming because we have this molecule called ozone in greater abundance up there than we do down here. It's formed by oxygen molecules breaking up from very high energy sunlight, ultraviolet light. And that reforms the oxygen atoms reform into a molecule with three oxygen atoms when they collide with an O2 molecule. And that molecule absorbs other wavelengths of ultraviolet light from the sun. And that helps to protect us and shield us from that radiation, which would otherwise be damaging to us because we evolved in a planet with an ozone layer. So we didn't have to worry about the damaging effect of that radiation. And there's a really great story about the ozone layer and how we first discovered the threats to the ozone layer and how we've really created an environmental success to worry out of that. It goes back to the early 1970s when people were proposing a fleet of stratospheric aircraft. And there was a Dutch scientist named Paul Krutsen who worked in Germany. And he's worked at NCAR here in Boulder all around the world. He started suggesting that some of the emissions from airplanes flying up in the stratosphere could be damaging. And that got scientists thinking about that and other things that could damage the ozone. And Mario Molina was a postdoc at Irvine and his advisor, Sherry Rowland. They in the lab found that these chemicals that had been invented in the 1920s called chlorofluorocarbons and were being used increasingly for all sorts of things. People might know of them as propellants and spray cans. They were also used to refrigerate and in air conditioners. They're used to blow styrofoam. They're used to clean computer ships that they essentially, they didn't break down in the troposphere. But once they got above the ozone layer, they did break down from some of that ultraviolet radiation and released chlorine into the stratosphere. And this leads to catalytic cycles where one molecule with chlorine in it can destroy hundreds of molecules of ozone over and over. There are also other things with bromine in them that have the same effect. And a lot of those are used in fire extinguishers, for example, and they predicted a loss of ozone of just about 1% over several decades. And it would happen very high in the ozone layer. But in 1985, we had a big surprise called the Antarctic Ozone Hole. This was first reported by a guy with the British Antarctic Survey called Joe Farman. And he had been taking measurements down there since about 1959. And starting around 1980, he started noticing that the ozone in certain time of the year, starting in September and then in October, November, the springtime down there was just dropping. And by the middle of the 1980s, by 1984 and 85, about half of the ozone layer over Antarctica was missing all of a sudden. And he'd been down there long enough to know that that wasn't right. But it took him a few years until 1985 to write a paper about it. And one reason was he knew that NASA had satellites measuring the ozone and they weren't reporting anything. Well, after the paper was published, it turned out that these ozone levels were so low that NASA had programmed their software to ignore such levels as being unreasonable. So they still had the data. They didn't throw it out. They went back and they found it and there was. But nobody was looking at it. And I mentioned my PhD advisor, Susan Solomon. She the next year led the National Ozone Expedition down in America and she started thinking about what could be causing this. And she saw these beautiful clouds down there called polar stratosphere clouds, which are clouds of ice up in the stratosphere because this is the coldest place on earth. And she started thinking of chemistry that could be happening on the surfaces that were created by these ice particles and how that interacted with the chlorine that we'd been pumping up into the stratosphere for decades and came up with a theory and wrote a paper about it and her expedition and two others basically corroborated this theory and showed that the chlorofluorocarbons and other related compounds were causing this ozone hole and it could be a big threat in the decades to follow that. So it actually led to a pretty quick action internationally where these substances were banned under the Montreal Protocol and the treaty was amended to make it stronger over time. And now we're starting to see the first signs of healing of the ozone hole. So the recipe for the ozone hole is first of all, you have to have these chlorofluorocarbons that humans are producing and related compounds with bromine. You have to have these cold temperatures that you only get in the stratosphere over Antarctica. And they're so cold, they produce these beautiful polar stratosphere clouds. As you can see, they're iridescent. They're also called mother of pearl clouds. They look like inside of an abalone shell. And finally you have to have sunlight. So this is why it happens in the springtime over Antarctica not in the winter because there's no sunlight in the winter there. So the winter is, their winter is our summer and then the sun comes back in their springtime which is September and October. And bam, it really depletes ozone rapidly each year. And volcanoes have an impact on that. This is from a paper in 1996 where these symbols, little asterisks and diamonds are observations of ozone over Antarctica over time from about 1977 until about 1993. And in that time we had two big eruptions as I mentioned before, El Chichon and Mount Pinatubo and those you can see taking kind of a bite out of the ozone each time. And the lines are different model simulations where the dashed line is one where we don't have any volcanic erupt aerosol changing. And the solid line includes the effects of these eruptions. And that matches the observations pretty well showing that the particles that the volcanoes put up interact to create more of these polar stratosphere clouds and cause more ozone loss. And then finally, this is from a more recent paper we did in 2016. And it shows the effects of volcanoes on ozone over Antarctica at the South Pole as calculated in our WACM model from about 2000 until through 2015. And we see a number of these eruptions having impacts of reducing ozone. And the big ones, as I mentioned from Southern Chile in 2011, this is called Pugewe Cordoncalle and in 2015 the Calbuco eruption contributing to the record large ozone hole in the year 2015. And the reason it's important to be able to calculate things like this is because we wanna know how the ozone hole is responding to our efforts to help it heal by banning these substances. And it's gonna, the ozone hole gets bigger and smaller each year depending on how cold it is, but also depending on things like volcanic eruptions. And so when we can remove the effects of volcanic eruptions, we can start to see a long-term trend. And in fact, this paper here is called the emergence of healing in the Antarctic ozone layer. And we showed that we're seeing the first signs of the ozone hole starting to heal because of this environmental success story of the Montreal Protocol. That's great. So in our last five or so minutes here, we have about seven questions for you, Mike. And one is kind of related to what we're talking about right now from Nachiket. Apologize if I'm not pronouncing your name correctly. But besides the anthropogenic CO2 buildup, and then maybe we just talked about how ozone can change. Do you notice any other chemical changes in stratosphere? Oh yeah, there are a lot of things that affect the stratosphere. And the question mentioned the carbon dioxide. And we think of carbon dioxide as warming the earth. And it does that by trapping heat in the lowest layer of the atmosphere, the troposphere. But it also has an effect higher in the atmosphere where it cools the stratosphere. And so that can have long-term effects. Any molecule that lasts more than a few decades and some of them last centuries and millennia is going to start building up if you're emitting it. Carbon dioxide, as I mentioned, can last thousands of years. There's some, there's a molecule called SF6, which has a global warming potential that actually stays in the atmosphere for tens of thousands of years. And it's a very powerful greenhouse gas. And then things like methane, which come from agriculture and from bacteria fermenting, it can come from rice production, but a big part of it comes from the digestive tracts of animals like cows and sheep. Methane lasts for a few decades and warms the atmosphere. And then once it gets up into the stratosphere, it does break down, but it also produces water up there. And so we're starting to see more water in the upper atmosphere from increasing methane. So there's all sorts of global changes effects on the upper atmosphere. Great, and maybe building on that, this may be a quick question. Ty's wondering if there's a big difference between volcanic aerosols staying contained in the northern hemisphere versus the southern hemisphere. Well, there are a lot more people in the northern hemisphere and there's a lot more land in the northern hemisphere. And so more people and food production is affected by eruptions in the northern hemisphere. And then as we saw in the southern hemisphere, because that's where the IR goes own hole is, eruptions that happen in the south have a much bigger effect on that. There are different reasons why there's a lot bigger ozone hole over Antarctica and not so much of an ozone hole over the Arctic, having to do largely with where the continents are and how the winds shape up there. So yeah, there are a lot of different hemispheric differences. Great, and now our next question is the highest voted question right now. And it's for all of our students that are out there now. So a high school student is wondering, what should I study for a job like yours? Yeah, well, a lot of math and physics. I do do chemistry, but I never really took a lot of the nasty organic chemistry, but I don't really understand. So the chemistry is more simple to most scientists, the chemistry that I do. But if you're interested in looking at pollution in the troposphere, then certainly organic chemistry is very important. We have all sorts of volatile organic compounds coming from not just pollution, but also from vegetation. And if you're considering a career in this field, I just say it's important to really talk to as many people who are in the field as possible and get a sense of what they do and what you'd like to do. Yeah, thanks for that advice. And definitely reach out to us too. We like to talk. So if you have questions, reach out to us. Great, so maybe in our last couple of minutes, we have about five questions. So they can be like quick fire answers, which I think might work with the remaining ones. So the one I'm seeing right now is what is the most dangerous volcano in the US or world? Yeah, probably Yellowstone. Great, and then next question. Michael's wondering, what is the relationship between volcanic areas and then earthquake prone areas? So a lot of times earthquakes will be measured before there's an eruption because there's lava moving underneath the volcano. And so that can be used sometimes to predict a volcanic eruption, but not always, sometimes there are surprises. And then a lot of the big earthquakes are not necessarily related to volcanoes, they're just due to fault lines slipping and that can happen on continents and also in the middle of the ocean and create tsunamis. And then maybe a follow on question to that, are volcanoes simply a spot where the earth liquid mantle comes through the crust? So that's a great question. I mentioned that happens in Yellowstone, that's a hot spot. Another example of that is Hawaii where we have a chain of islands and there's really only one of them over the hot spot, the big island Hawaii, but all the other Hawaiian islands used to be over the hot spot and they moved and they're smaller than the big island because they've eroded over millions of years since they've moved away. But most volcanoes are not from something like a hot spot, they're due to plates getting subducted in the, for example, in the Northwestern US, there's the Pacific plate going underneath the North American plate and things like water get trapped in there and as they get heated up in the mantle that water turns into gas and that wants to create an explosion and lava can find its way to the surface through that sort of geologic process. Great, and maybe staying on the theme of the Yellowstone super volcano, Michael's wondering if one, is there a range of scenarios for different eruption energies? And two, will global cooling have severely dimmed sunlight as well? There's a scale called a volcanic explosivity index which is a logarithmic scale where you go from one to two, you're about 10 times more energy or something like that. And I think it goes up to six. So scientists measure volcanoes on a scale. Actually, I think there are more energies and failure eruptions than that. And so the energy is one factor. It's not necessarily the most important factor in how it'll affect the climate. It can determine whether material gets high enough into the stratosphere that has a global effect. But you also need to have a sulfur in order to have a lasting impact. And the, yeah, I guess that's my answer. Yeah, it's great. Great, so our last question and this is kind of a fun one because as earth scientists, we love our acronyms. Katherine is wondering, I've always wanted to know how did the name Wacom come to be? Yeah, I wasn't there at the time but there are the three scientists really who the fathers of Wacom who work at NCAR and they, I don't know, but it's a great name. And we have fun with it, especially when we're trying to tune different parts of the atmosphere so that they match what we see. And when we fix one area and another part goes out of Wac, and we call that Wacomole. Perfect, I love it. And with that, thank you, Mike, so much for being here today and kind of sharing all your knowledge about volcanoes and the work that you do. Thanks very much. Yeah, and I also just want to give a quick shout out to our team behind the scenes. So Paul, Brett, Alia and Lorena, thanks for helping things go smoothly at the background. And for everybody, if you're interested in more NCAR Explorer series events, definitely check out our website for all of our upcoming lectures and conversations and also to view recordings of our past events. And so I hope to see y'all next time and have a great rest of your day.


Digital marketing is the selling and promoting of products, services, or content through the use of the internet and modern technology. Digital marketing is similar to traditional marketing with a few key differences. Digital marketing, for instance, tends to cost less, especially if you're selling a digital product. Whereas traditional marketing not only costs more, but typically you also have to pay for infrastructure costs such as physical storage. Another massive difference, and this might be the most important thing, is that digital marketing is incredibly measurable. When it comes to digital marketing, you know what your return on investment is for your ads. Whereas with traditional marketing, a lot of the time you don't know what your return on investment is or whether you're even getting a return on investment at all. Think about it, if you're running an online ad, you can easily track that data. Whereas if you put up a billboard, it's very difficult to tell whether that's actually going to move the needle and make a difference in your bottom line. So not only is digital marketing more measurable, but it's also a lot more predictable. And this means that it's much easier to scale your business if you rely on digital marketing rather than traditional. Another difference is that digital marketing tends to change often. For instance, the way Facebook ads were run five years ago is completely different than the way they're run now. And so in order to stay up to date on the latest trends in digital marketing, you have to be actively practicing it. Whereas traditional marketing, for the most part, stays the same over time. Of course, there's always going to be little differences here and there. But for the most part, it's been pretty much the same for the last 50 to 100 years. According to a study by 99 firms in 2019, content marketing, which is a type of digital marketing, has a lower cost of about 62% against the practice of traditional marketing, while being able to generate three times more leads, and they were able to generate these leads faster and more predictably. According to a study by Smart Insights in 2020, more than half of the world is now active on social media. The world's population is 8 billion, so that means over 4 billion people are currently on social media. That means billions of people are using different search engines like Google or social media websites like Facebook or Instagram. Now, there are many different types of digital marketing, and I'm going to briefly go over all of them. But with that being said, if you are interested in becoming a digital marketer, I highly recommend you check out my friend Seth's course. He does have a free masterclass, which I will link down in the comments as well as the description below. Seth has helped thousands and thousands of people become digital marketers, and he has tons of testimonials and reviews on his YouTube channel as well as his Instagram. So definitely check that out if you want to learn more. But with that being said, the first type of digital marketing is going to be social media marketing. This is the use of social media platforms to interact with potential and existing clients. This type of digital marketing is powerful when a business finds a way to create a trend or to be viral through a public event or through the influence of famous people. This is also commonly referred to as content marketing. Although this is typically a slower way to get clients, it does help to build your brand and it also establishes trust with the people who are following your account. The second type of digital marketing is search engine optimization. This process requires a website owner to create changes in and out of his website to increase his or her website's search ranking. This allows people to organically find a company's website. And there are websites such as nerdwallet.com that are valued at hundreds of millions of dollars just from the free traffic they get from people searching Google. This is another relatively slow way of getting clients, but again, increases brand recognition as well as trust. And if you stay at it for long enough, you can get a steady stream of people who find you through Google. And then you can retarget those people with ads. The next type of digital marketing is search engine marketing or SEM. This is where you pay search engines like Google.com in order to show your ad to people who are searching for particular terms. Next on the list is going to be email marketing. This is where you craft emails to send to your customers in order to advertise discounts or products and services that you want to let them know about. This type of marketing has an insanely high return on investment. Many estimate that for every $1 spent on growing your email list, you end up making over $30. And companies hire people to write the copy in these emails, design the banners for the emails as well as track the data. Last, we're going to talk about digital advertising. This is where you might see an ad on a social media platform like Facebook or YouTube. These ads can be incredibly annoying, but you have to realize that the only reason that companies can offer free services such as YouTube is because of the fact that they have these ads. Now, as you can imagine, digital marketing is an incredibly valuable skill set to learn. Companies have been spending less on traditional marketing and more on digital marketing for the last decade. And that trend is likely going to continue for the foreseeable future. This is one of the most valuable skills that you can possibly learn. And if you want to see how a 16-year-old was able to get a job as a digital marketer, check out this video right here.


So welcome to our second episode of Ask an Analyst and today we have again Sarah and Fabian. Welcome. Hello. Hello. And today's topic is our job and our daily work. Yeah, what our workday looks like. And that's also one of the first questions from Sebastian. What is it like to work for malware analysis? And what do you do at work? So Sarah, what do you do? Well, usually I work part-time. So I usually do kind of a mix of things when I have time. So usually I sometimes write signatures. I've also added like malicious URLs. I've written a blog post before. Let's buy it. And you Fabian? Well, I'm technically not an analyst. My job looks a lot different. Mostly because MZsoft is a very small company, kind of. And our teams are very small compared to, well, much bigger antivirus vendors. So my job is a whole lot more diverse, I would say.  I do a little bit of analyzing. I don't do most of the detections. I usually concentrate on the behavior-based detections because those are code-based. I do a ton of normal development work, like on the scan engine, on the behavior blocker, on the real-time protection, and stuff like that. So you're actually also a developer? I'm mostly a developer. And the analysis part is just on the side in my free time. He does run somewhere when he's not doing other things because I make him do it. Yeah. She's whipping me. Help. I need help. And yeah. So I'm primarily a developer. But as I said, we are very small companies. So our, the roles in our team aren't as clear-cut as they are in many other teams, that you only do analysis or that you only do development, for example, but it's just a mix of everything pretty much from operations over development to analysis and stuff like that. Then there's also the occasional press gig, I would say, like giving interviews or coming up with a blog post, trying to teach marketing people how to do malware stuff properly because they have no clue. They are all marketing people. And yeah. You just offended every marketing person that totally watches these videos? Oh, they are used to that. They are definitely used to that. You can ask every single marketing person out there about their relationship to developers and sales people and they get insulted by everyone. So I think it's fine. All right. I'm probably then more the typical malware analyst. We have about, GData has about 400 people.  We have like 30. But we are still very small compared to Kaspersky. I mean Kaspersky has a few hundred malware analysts. We have nine and yeah. Well, what do I do? We have kind of a pool of tickets and there's a sample attached to every ticket and they have one of four or five different priorities. So if there are several samples of the highest priority, I can choose what sample I like to analyze. So I have a little bit of freedom to choose what I do. And yeah. Then I take the sample. I analyze it. Is it malicious? Is it pub? Is it clean? Is it junk? And then I if the sample is not detected, then I write a detection signature. And that's I think the most part of my work. But also sometimes I write blog articles or help with blog articles. Sometimes we talk to journalists and sometimes also to law enforcement. So German law enforcement. Yeah. And we started that recently with joining the No More Ransom thing. Yeah. Like it's it's kind of kind of insane. I'm not sure how how your experience with law enforcement has been so far. Not much. Not much. I just got a call once about ransomware. But that's it. Yeah. So I talked to like a Dutch police officer recently. And it's just and it's just insane how how computer literate some of them are. Like I had to explain to them what is an IP address and what is a port and what is an ASN and what is voice and pretty much what is everything like I gave them a written report about a ransomware server that Sarah and I found in within tour like like we deep anonymized in and found figured out there. Yes. And figured out there they're clean at IP. And we got back like a list of questions of like 50 questions with most basic thing you can imagine. It was it was pretty insane. So there are there are definitely lots of deficits on the law enforcement side when it's come when it comes to these things it seems. Yeah. Something else that we do is we have on call. We have security response on call. So it could be in a very bad case that we detect an important system file. And in that case someone would call me in the middle of the night wake me up and say please fix that. So that's also something I do. It's I have I don't have to do it. So that's my choice. I just earn a bit more money with that. And another thing we also do a little bit of development. We have our own internal tools that we develop that we use on a daily basis. And so every analyst also does a little bit development. Yeah. Not the engine. I think that's I think that's the case for a lot of antivirus vendors though that the analysts do a little bit of development. In many cases it's like just simple automation of simple tasks like simple scripting and Python for example. But yeah that's that's pretty common actually for analysts to do like a little bit of development because I mean they they do this all day long. Right. They know what tools they need and what is helpful for them. Yeah. Having like a script to do it. Some of it. Definitely. Yeah. We also do sometimes proof of concept codes that the developers then built into the engine. So yeah sometimes that's a very good way to to create new things. And it's also how a lot of like engine developers or well if we want to call them then they often start off as malware analysis and analysts that then slowly transition into engine development because they did a lot of proof of concepts and stuff like that. Right. Let's go to the next question from Corey. What made you get into the industry? That's actually two questions. And if you could do anything else you wanted for a job what would it be? So what made you get into the industry Fabian? I think I already mentioned that before. Right. In the last episode like we kind of covered it last time. You can you can not say second bit I think. Yeah. Yeah. Just just to quickly reiterate I got infected by Tequila ages ago when I was like 10 or 11 or so and I didn't have an AV at hand. So I just took it part and I just like doing it pretty much. So that's how I got into.  A teacher for which subject? Probably probably maths and probably one of the other sciences probably physics or chemistry I think or maybe maybe philosophy. I think I could be a good philosophy teacher just because I like talking to you doing that. Yeah. It's kind of interesting and I think what most people don't know is that I actually learned kindergarten teacher before I studied computer science. Oh you did? Oh wow. So I really love kids. I love working with children but I am not capable of doing that for a long time. Let's say on a daily basis because I'm not multi-tasking or able. Oh yeah. You totally need that because...  Unless you are like kind of a private nanny I guess where you can concentrate on just one kid. Now even with one kid it's exhausting. I don't know. I don't have kids. You don't have kids. You wouldn't know. But yeah if you are an introvert and if you are very much on one let's say not not able to multitask then it's really exhausting to have this kind of job and I have high respect of everyone who's able to do that. I'd rather switch to computers and that's something I can do better and they are easier to understand actually. Yeah they're pretty binary you could say. Yeah it's such a great pun. Amazing pun. So Sarah what would you do if you couldn't do malware analysis? Well I do chemistry as part of my A levels and I would probably go into like synthesizing organic chemistry like organic chemistry and synthesizing organic chemicals because I find that really fascinating. Wow that sounds interesting. She would essentially like build a real life viruses I guess. Oh drugs okay.  Yeah I guess I guess both probably yeah. But yeah you could make you can combine them and make drugs for like certain viruses and bacteria. Yeah that's pretty cool. Have you ever sort of complaining computer science and biology or chemistry? I think that would be cool but I'd rather like focus on the analyzing and then maybe if I want to change go and like study chemistry at uni later on just like expand my knowledge because I think that would be pretty cool. Yeah that's to answer the question from me I considered that I considered combining medicine and computer science or biology and computer science and when I was doing my bachelor's thesis I had the opportunity or I almost did my bachelor's thesis in artificial neural networks and using them for image processing of MRI images so magnetic resonance imaging images and it didn't work out sadly because my supervisor guard was placed in a different area suddenly so I had to choose another topic for my bachelor's thesis which was a bit sad but that's something that really interested me on the direction I might have pursued if the mother analysis had not worked out. Okay next question is from Micha what tools do you use on a daily basis and what tools do you never use on the Y? Sarah? Personally I use sublime as like a text editor that's a really good text editor by the way. I also use a hex editor just for like checking out encrypted files malware binaries etc when I'm doing analyzing I usually use process hacker wire shark and like network sniffing tools and then also red shop is quite useful because it shows you all the changes that like for example a pub can make on a system so they're my main tools and you Fabian? Well for me it's like a whole bunch of tools like virus total, sublime text, 010 editor as an hex editor, idop pro a lot like a lot. Yara? Yeah it's always idop pro and visual studio like with a couple of instances. Then dnspy for all the net stuff lots of python, fire shark, VMware, like rack shot then. Sarah already mentioned api monitor, yeah X64 debug as a debugger and yeah like a couple of like internal tools that we have. Tools I never knew are usually the tools that I simply don't know about which is probably a ton. I don't get around much when it comes to tools I just stick to the stuff I know. I don't think there's like any tool that I would outright refuse to use. I mean if it fits like the purpose then I will probably use it at one point. Yeah also makes sense if some tool doesn't work we just use another right? Yeah I mean I don't know maybe maybe yeah I think I refuse to use notepad plus plus because it's an awful text editor and sublime is just so much better and yes I just started an editor war. I guess I should I should try sublime once because I use notepad plus plus. Does it even have like a linux port? No I use windows for that because but I mean sublime has linux port I think.  On linux I use vim but for the daily work. Oh no you started another war. For the daily work we have to work on windows machines so I have to use something else. I mean there is vim on windows right? Yeah of course. So you could use that. No no try try sublime it even has like a vintage mode so you can use all your nice vim skills to do stuff and like that like all the keyboard hackery. You can use it in sublime as well so you don't have to learn like another editor. Yeah the tools I use are yeah similar to yours. I also use idar I use vmware Hxd, dnsway, jara, portex analyzer so sysinternals via shark as well and our own internal tools. Yeah same as fabian I can't say which tools I never use it's just there are so many to choose from and I just can't try all of them. Yeah and sometimes you have to use ones or twice in a year. Yeah some special malware like I don't know like lisp malware. Yeah okay four octets asks do you as a professional focus on one family of malware or whatever is put in front of you? I think I answered that question a bit already because I have to analyze everything I get but since I have some kind of way or some freedom to choose the samples if I get ransomware samples I usually choose them at first so yeah how about you Sarah do you specialize or do you do everything? I really specialize in a certain family but I have written occasional like I think we followed apocalypse quite apocalypse ransomware quite closely me and fabian so that was one such family but usually like when I'm just adding signatures I just work on whatever there is which is either malware or pubs. Fabian? Well I am like in a little bit more privileged position I guess so I can pretty much choose whatever I want to to work on since like analysis isn't my day-to-day job. I think like if you are like a normal analyst then you will pretty much just work on whatever is in front of you but there's almost always like almost a natural transition to specialize in a certain area like yeah you just happen to do ransomware a lot and then suddenly you become like the ransomware guy in the lab and they will they will just shuffle all the ransomware into your direction because you you're just used to dealing with them and you are just a lot quicker analyzing and taking them apart than the other guys but yeah I think it's important to handle a lot of different malware though as an analyst so you have like a broader spectrum that you can draw from when you have to deal with especially with like more complicated malware or malware that uses something or uses techniques that are new and uncommon at the point of time when you when you analyze it so yeah don't try to specialize too too soon or too quickly. Yeah it's actually also quite interesting to have a very wide range of different types of malware but as you said we also have like the guy for potentially unwanted software we have the guy for scripting malware those are just people that like to do these types of malware or samples more than others so they usually do the work but every one of us has to deal with everything if necessary. All right next question is by Corey what is the most frustrating thing about the industry that's an interesting question and I think Fabian you have to you might have some interesting answers.  Yeah and have been for like the last 15 years or so I mean the the the last pure signature base scanners were back in in the DOS age and even in the DOS age they already had behavior blockers right that was like 20 or 25 years ago I think like learning from like viruses and stuff. Yeah I mean like like Bayer's filtering for example has been in use for quite some time and I mean it's it's not exactly machine learning like in the in the same sense that we use the term nowadays but it's kind of in in that direction and I'm pretty sure that even the current and modern machine learning algorithms has have been in use like for a very very long time. Yeah that's also my point that I think the wrong understanding about how AVs work is just frustrating because it's not only the marketing people but I think the marketing people just give that knowledge to everyone else that's false understanding. Yeah anything else Sarah? No I think it was already covered. Yeah surprise all the tech guys hating marketing very big surprise at this point. Well I don't hate it I just yeah but you get annoyed by it right? Sometimes yes. Yeah it's just frustrating. All the people that say AVs are useless. Don't run an AV you're gonna get infected by zero day targeting antivirus. Yeah which literally never happens right? I think there isn't a single documented case I think. I don't know kind of environment where there's a lot of sensitive data I don't think you're going to be like targeted by them people. I'm pretty sure that yeah but in those cases in those cases the systems tend to be very restricted in like sandbox like and they don't run AV anyway. Yeah another question to you Fabian by Corey with all the decryptors you have written what is the best reaction you have gotten from the malware authors? Oh that's easy I have documented it on my Twitter feed that's it's all rage. I mean it's it's like particularly funny when they actually make my job easier by raging at me like the Radamund guys for example they got so upset at me for breaking their ransomware over and over again that they wanted to insult me so badly that they stored their insults in some variables that were previously uninitialized and by doing that they actually made my decryptor a lot more reliable and a lot quicker because I had like I just honestly you can you can put as many insults at me as you want into your into your shitty ransomware especially if it makes my job easier because all I had to do oh yeah now suddenly I know what those variables were so I know exactly if I got the right key and I don't have to do like hacky format-based detection stuff or something like that. That's funny yeah so yeah I was also once hunting malware on various total just searching for curse words for bad words so yeah I found a lot of stuff yeah I think you even set up a signature so if someone insults you then you kind of can see it yes I do it's the I am famous rule it's like a little yara rule that looks for several curse words and mzsoft and my name and stuff like that and it actually thinks quite a bit so yeah that's done but yeah the rage is pretty funny actually and I documented on my twitter feed so follow me on twitter yeah all right how long does it take you to analyze a sample on average Sarah um usually if I'm just doing generic signatures it will take not that long because I just run the malware wait for it to make its changes and then I check what changes made and then just write a signature which doesn't take that long so I guess five to ten minutes per malware sample less if it's just decides it's gonna quit and go crash yeah the amount of buggy malware samples out there is just insane so many so many I'm so often tempted to write a bug report yeah me too or like or like contact information so we can give them a bug report and tell them to fix their duty and include your whatsapp number or something like that inside the malware binary and we will submit bug reports I mean like the friendly police person will knock on your door and then deliver it personally I think but yeah that would be awesome so how long does it take for you for real I think it's it depends a lot on why you're analyzing that malware I mean if the purpose is just detection that it's just a couple of minutes pretty much like Sarah already mentioned um if you want to know exactly how it works and or if you want to reverse engineer like protocol details so you can create your own client for botnet to just scan the botnet and map out the botnet and stuff like that then it will take a lot longer I do mostly ransomware as everybody knows probably so I I think I know pretty quickly whether or not the ransomware is most likely secure or not yeah usually it's like I say half an hour yeah usually about the average time then getting all the details right like reversing final name obfuscation or figuring out how the encrypted file format is laid out exactly and stuff like that that can take like a couple of hours or even days like depending on how complex the whole thing is um I guess on average it takes probably like around eight hours for me to take apart a new ransomware family and then writing a decrypter if it's possible I would think eight hours sounds about Ryan Ryan yeah I would agree I also I have a hard time to put a number on that uh how long it takes me because that varies a lot even if it's just for signature detection we also write um algorithmic detections so sometimes um I might have to write a lot of programming code for for instance if there's a feature that we need but don't have yet I write functions for that myself and that might take a few days so uh it could be that I have to work a few days on a sample but the usual case is 10 to 30 minutes um including the decision if the file is malicious or not if it's a clean file it takes longer I really hate to analyze clean files because they are boring and I agree yeah and you have to do well it's hard to prove the absence of something so it's hard to prove that the file is clean yeah if you have a malware you can open it up in a hex that I don't see immediately that it is malicious often yeah in many cases you can in many many cases yeah so that's then the easier case so yeah security people ask how often do you see novel packing techniques Sarah um I don't think I've ever seen any but I haven't been like working on it for too long but I would say probably it's quite rare generally and you Fabian there are even there are novel packing techniques like that are like 10 years old I mean yeah it's like like all the other packing and obfuscation stuff is kind of kind of really really boring and you have to do it like all the time and it's really annoying because it doesn't really I mean it just slows you down a bit and for for most packing techniques if it doesn't like involve um a compiled time obfuscation or something like that or some some virtual machine somewhere and it only takes like a couple of minutes to to get around so yeah no you don't see it that often I mean I think one of the things that a lot of malware authors don't understand is the more you pack and obfuscate your files the easier they are to detect because yeah I mean not a lot of applications out there that are packed or obfuscated I mean there are a few um like DRM systems and stuff like that but yeah the more exotic you get and the more um the more your file kind of sticks out um from a large crowd of files the easier you will get detected yeah some vendors even flag certain packers oh yeah a lot of them do I mean just just take like like morphine and pack any file you want and you will get dozens of detection and I mean it makes sense I mean a lot of those packers are exclusively used by by by ransomware or well not only ransomware but malware in general so I mean why bother adding all the all the actual malware families or even write an unpacker if you can just reliably reliably detect the malware packers yeah but even for the commercial packers like tomato um some vendors just take the packer although it's by legitimate software as well yes and no um the way for the way it works there is that a lot of the commercial software protection tools embed like the license code or like a watermark who who essentially packed this uh this file and if you take licenses that have been leaked or that are just in in distribution because um of various or because uh yeah as I said someone leaked the license then they um detects the digital signatures and the watermarks that these specific versions leave behind in the file I don't think I mean I I do have like um uh thymider if it's if it's pronounced that way I have no idea a thymider license and I'm pretty sure if I would pack like uh with my personal license uh notepad stuff like that I won't get too many detections but if if I would use a pirated version of thymider or a version that is in circulation within um malware forums for example or hacking forums I would get it a lot more and that's based on the little digital watermark that these versions leave behind in the packed files yeah and now the the last set of questions is questions is I think the most interesting code and I saved it for for the end of our podcast um it's a sexy lady asked what part of your job do you find the most interesting and hasher is zada I'm also not sure how it's pronounced I'm sorry if it's wrong um what do you like the most malware what excites you about this job and you Sarah you added the question what's the thing you enjoy most about your job why do you like analyzing malware so it's basically I would say three questions so what's the most interesting what's the thing you like the most and what's the most exciting part um of your job Sarah um I think the thing I like the most is being like able to kind of detect a whole bunch of like malware and then seeing that actually like being detected when I go to scan the files myself so I feel like I'm kind of contributing um the exciting part is probably finding new ransomware um making sure that we look into it like seeing if it's interesting has anything new and then if it's like decryptable getting a decrypto made so that's quite exciting um the most interesting part is probably just learning about malware generally it's kind of like a puzzle so kind of trying to figure everything out certain types of malware so yeah euphobian I think I just like those little critters I mean they are I like taking them apart like breaking them if I can um I even like coming up with like new or novel ways of preventing them and before I got into malware analysis I even enjoyed just collecting them and um yeah kind of like people collected stamps I mean nowadays it's not really feasible for like a single person to have a huge malware collection because we are in the hundreds of terabyte region right now well if you were to collect as well yeah but like in in the good old DOS days when they were like a handful of viruses it was pretty fun just collecting them all like pokemon I mean like a more nerdy and probably shittier version of pokemon but yeah I still collect interesting malware though yeah I I I also do like I have like my my my special ransomware collection that we use for regression testing of our behavior blocker for example and stuff like that in a bit neat and yeah it's it's awesome if you have OCD or just just the nerd like I am um so yeah so essentially it's all just one huge puzzle to me and I really really like puzzles and yeah it's one puzzle with seemingly an endless amount of pieces so I just like like doing it yeah uh for me um but uh it's similar to Sarah that I like the most this the satisfaction of detecting malware when I write a signature and I get the feedback that it prevented infections for a lot of people it's just an amazing feeling like oh wow now this person didn't get infected because of my work and that's something I really like um exciting part is also for me hunting malware like you said pokemon that's exactly what it is you hunt uh malware and if you find something new it's um yeah it's quite quite interesting and exciting yeah um sometimes seeing um new languages programming languages used or new techniques used can be very exciting uh and also when I started out I mean I started two years ago so it's not that long ago I'm still kind of a beginner um if I correct something difficult or something that had been difficult for me um I also get this adren and lean rush yeah so it's really amazing um what's the most interesting part yeah learning new things getting in touch with new file formats new languages um yeah and also the connecting with fellow researchers is and talking to them about oh and early stuff is quite amazing yeah so people is quite good yeah and the entire malware analysis part kind of forces you to do that as well right I mean if you're an introvert and you have like a hard time connecting to people I mean at least you have something to talk about and um usually um the other side is just as enthusiastic and um knowledgeable about the topic that that you are also you have like a common base to connect with people it's it's kind of interesting plus since the area is so diverse with different types everywhere you are kind of forced to to learn new stuff all the time which is kind of interesting if you if you are like like learning and like improving yourself so yes and asking the experts for help is also something you usually do if you don't get anywhere um if you have a sample that you can't crack then just ask your colleagues and yeah and no one or at least I made the experience that no one um is so arrogant and in their response or something they are all very helpful and uh yeah just help out maybe ask you back for the things you are the expert in yeah yeah yeah that's that's already everything for today so um it's very very well I'm not sure what to say it's it's great talking to you and um it's interesting then you have so or that our views of what's interesting and citing are so similar um yeah and then next uh in the next podcast we will be covering the career how to become an analyst and how to balance learning and other things um so this will be a very interesting topic as well and I hope to see you soon okay so bye bye bye yeah thanks for watching thanks for having us thanks


Welcome to the Scratch Hour of Code activity where you'll create an interactive holiday card that you can share with friends and family. Think about your favorite holiday memories. What images and sounds come to mind? If you need extra inspiration, check out some of the projects in the Holiday Card Studio. Have some ideas for your card? Great! Let's get started by deleting the cat.


This smooth-core competition has been an amazing experience for us, like right from the start of national round, even college rounds, there has been all-nighters, even after the selection of the teams, we've sat down many times to discuss and, you know, we've quarreled against each other at times, you know, we've supported each other and our coach in fact was amazing. Right from the national rounds, my friend has been an amazing researcher and without him, you know, we could not have, you know, brought such arguments at all and right from the beginning, my other friend, she's been an amazing orator, I mean, she's been national champion and she's been regional champion here as well. So it was a team effort, a combination of efforts from all of us that took us here and in fact, we never thought we could qualify into the semi-finals as well. We were like, our hopes were not high at all but the fact that this happened in Nepal itself, we had a lot of friends who encouraged us, I think that pushed us a bit farther so that, you know, we could gain something in each and every step. This in fact was an opportunity for us to learn rather than compete or win and this was actually a bonus for us. Well, we can say that we're looking forward to the Hong Kong round as well, of course, but as we came in the regional round with no expectations, we're going with the same aim of learning. And it was a wonderful competition between the teams and I learned a lot from judges, from coaches, from participants and it was a valuable experience for me to participate in this competition. We are going to be prepared for Hong Kong competition and it is really enjoyable for us.