I woke up at 0430 this morning to see a Twitter message from a member of my Discord.

To those who don’t/didn’t know, I ran a Discord with ~250 members that discussed malware reverse engineering and development. I checked my email, groggily, and saw the below email

https://x.com/valhalla_dev/status/1829100121880945136

Not only had the server been deleted, but my account was suspended indefinitely. That latter bit sucked particularly bad, as I was a member of several servers that I really enjoyed and had some cool friends on there.

I also had a paid membership via Subbb that allowed members to gain access to members-only channels where we discussed malware development and took part in research efforts in that sphere.

Notably:

• I did not let anyone share malware source code. We just discussed its development
• I actively removed pirated and other illegal material. It was immediately a problem and I immediately took it down. This was mainly in an effort to prevent this exact thing from happening.
• I had just removed one newer, non-paid user for advertising a garbage script kiddy remote access trojan (RAT) that they had developed and were selling the day before my server got nuked. I have a hunch they got mad that they were booted and reported the server.
• Most notably: I immediately deactivated all paid member accounts so nobody would get charged while the community is down and I’m appealing the decision. You should have received an email from Subbb and one from me early this morning.

I could go on a long tirade about how it sucks that freedom of speech is dead, censorship and muh oppression, blah blah blah. The truth is that malware development research has always sat on the fringe of most community’s terms of service, and I honestly expected the server to get in trouble at some point. I didn’t expect a takedown with no warning, and I definitely didn’t expect my entire account to get nuked, but here we are.

To the folks that were members of the Discord, especially the paid members, thank you for your support and for building what was a pretty cool community. I appealed Discord’s decision, but I’m honestly not expecting the server to get reinstated.

A couple of folks have asked if there will be a new community on a different platform. My answer is “I have no idea, but probably not.” Discord was a pretty cool platform for a community like this, but it’s rife with bots, porn and other spam and actually malicious activity, and I was constantly afraid of having to deal with a takedown, raid, etc. I don’t think Discord as a technology is bad, but the activity that happens on there is pretty rotten.

What I’m likely going to do is build out a community on a forum or have some other form of gated-access community in the future for stuff like this where I own the data and can migrate if it gets taken down. This is going to incur a good bit of cost in terms of time and monetary spend, so I’m going to need to figure that out before I move forward.

In the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter and watch this blog for research, announcements, etc. Hate this happened, but not overly surprised. Life goes on!