fucking hell this is some impressive shit
"Did Microsoft Just Manually Patch Their Equation Editor Executable? Why Yes, Yes They Did. (CVE-2017-11882)"
https://0patch.blogspot.ca/2017/11/did-microsoft-just-manually-patch-their.html
"Really, quite literally, some pretty skilled Microsoft employee or contractor reverse engineered our friend EQNEDT32.EXE, located the flawed code, and corrected it by manually overwriting existing instructions with better ones (making sure to only use the space previously occupied by original instructions)."
I hope whoever did this gets a raise tbh
I hope they put it in their CV
"I fucking manually patched a EXE for a program we didn't have the source for and didn't fuck it up, just hire me already"
@TheGibson almost definitely yeah
as a non-programmer this is essentially computer black magic
@staticsafe i wouldnt want to do what he/she did... But I have been in dilemmas of similar complexity... High risk=high rewards.
Its impressive, but I guarantee the programmer only thought so after-the-fact if at all.
@thegibson @staticsafe I'd bet too busy cussing up a storm about lack of source code, to think about the impressiveness until the job was done.
@staticsafe I saw some folks at bridsite speculate that they might not have a working build environment, not that they lost the source.
@cbane yeah that is possible too, it is quite an old program
@staticsafe @cbane That sounds like a plausible reason for necessity to become the parent of invention.
@staticsafe lots and lots of testing went into that.