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Best Poems Written by Haoxi Tan

Below are the all-time best Haoxi Tan poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

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The Phisherman's Rhyme

I have my job, and you have yours
I earn more though, that's for sure

I cast nets out to the net
phishing baits and mimikatz

I catch you, your family and friends
Lock your files up, and ask for cash

Oh, don't worry my friend
keep doing your job, and I'll do mine

I'll visit you again, some time
and slip in through the click streams
of your peace of mind

===

Mimikatz: popular open source password stealer used by criminals and testers alike to dump Windows credentials

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A Programmer's Ride

Welcome to twenty twenty
Where digital illiteracy is illiteracy

Cash and coins encoded binary
Banks and schools running on scripts

Hidden behind the telescreens
is Alice the programmer;

her fingers as QUIC as the data stream
as she races the ARMed processor;

together, they control the world unseen.

Over the LAN cables, 
steps in her partner,
he said hey Alice!
want some coffee later?

Tired, she smiles
as she sips the warm foam
from the cappuccino
and pushes her chair up

Down her bloodstream goes the caffeinated sugar
Neurons fire up faster than optic fibre

"I got it!" she screams
and spits out lines of code 
onto the flashing screen

Hands shaking, she hit ENTER
murmurs flooded
over her shoulder

"YES! DAMN!"
they all got off their chairs
as the new commit flies
across the data center

Alice sits down
with a glass of champagne
trying to init shutdown
on her hypervising brain
as the algorithmic memories regress
on just another day.


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QUIC: The new HTTP/3 protocol developed by Google and IETF (internet engineering task force). Used by sites like Youtube to stream data QUICkly

ARM: Advanced RISC Machine, the CPU architecture that runs on our mobile phones, routers, embedded devices and even the new Mac book 

LAN: Local Area Network

Hypervising: a hypervisor is the software that controls multiple Virtual Machines inside a computer

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The Digital War

A computer can become a gun
pointing at your average homosapien

The needle through the butt
of the mis-coded elePHPant

The Low Orbit Ion Cannon
burning websites for satisfaction

Insecurity, the most widespread crime
allowing the good, the bad and the 
greedy of our time
to steal, delete and modify
the bits and bytes that make our lives.

Details | Haoxi Tan Poem

Where the Fault Belongs

Hackers or developers?
I say both.
For hacking had never been bad
Until public ignorance said so.

It is all the same though,
the endless game of wack-a-mole
between bad code and bad code.

Convenience over security,
speed over quality
Oh no! Windows is updating!
Says the innocent user
guilty only of ignorance.

Leave it on, the clumsy giant says
Oh no, please don't.
The code stays closed, 
The price not so low.
The money flows,
And the fruit hangs low.

Details | Haoxi Tan Poem

The Siren That Never Went

Was just another BAU day 
at Duesseldorf Uni
Lads in the IT room 
playing minesweeper and internet spades

A few emails here and there
RE: IT Support Needed
I can't access my files
Something's wrong with Citrix

George stroke his beard
Screw it, must be stupid SMB
We should've stuck with UNIX
"Something's going on", said Emery
Anxiously searching Elastic

Things are starting to look encrypted

Gasps shouted across the room
As they stared at the long ransom note
Off went the not-so-classic ring tones
on the IT admins' work phones

Nicht das.. Nein!
Swear words dropped on the white bricks
As Emery ran across emergency
Notepad.exe open with bitcoin addresses
mocking her steps pass every screen
PA's buzzing, an ambulance redirected

The white van blazes towards Wuppertal
It's whole thirty kilometers
As the CRT screen rang
A white line cut across the missed murder
From a siren that never went


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In remembrance to the woman that died on September 9 2020, the first person that died directly due to a ransomware attack. She had to be redirected to a hospital in Wuppertal 19 miles (30 km) away and died in the ambulance on the way.

The Siren that never went was the network intrusion detected too late.
The IT department described is mostly fictional.

Glossary

BAU - Business As Usual

minesweeper and internet spades - games built-in to Windows XP

Citrix - popular and dirty commercial remote access software. It's remote code execution vulnerability allowed hackers to get in thousands of systems

SMB - Server Message Block, the protocol used by Microsoft Windows networks to share files

UNIX - A simple and secure operating system standard, implemented by BSD, MacOS, Solaris and some Linux distributions

Elastic - ElasticSearch, a search engine often used in the ELK stack (Elastic,Logstash,Kibana) to search events and data across different network endpoints

"Nicht das.. Nein!" - German for "not this.. no!"

Notepad.exe - the program often used to display ransomware notes by cyber criminals

bitcoin - a cryptocurrency that's hard to trace, often used by criminals to demand ransomware payments

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Blinkenlights

Amber stays on with the network link
Green with the DNS traffic blinks

White clicks tighten top of the NIC
Blue twisted pairs across the ceiling

Black shims across the server room
Lime blinks on the terminal prompt

Pale goes my hands
on the cold key caps

Red strains my eyes
as I stare down the beast
behind the blinkenlights

-- glossary --

DNS: Domain Name Service, how the internet resolves websites (like poetrysoup.com) to its IP address destination

NIC: Network Interface Card, the hardware that managed network connections

twisted pair: the most common configuration of ethernet cables

Details | Haoxi Tan Poem

My Fishy

Jesus never called me to be a fisher of woman,
but you changed that.

I waited, impatiently, for the hook to shake;
I never thought you would add me in just a few days.

Well, Facebook was never the place to date,
and I guess in many ways,
I was creepy;

But you passed yet another test,
When you weren't shaken as I figured out your address.

So I thought I'd come over,
And test the waters out;
Little did I know,
The lake of love would take me down.

So here we are,
me and my fishy,
now you will always have me around.

Details | Haoxi Tan Poem

Growing Up

I wander in my thoughts at night
Trying to find a place to hide

From the eternal war
between darkness and night

and all the little frail nations
claiming to be might

Where is peace, but among children?
Growing up just wasn't what I imagined