(Replying to PARENT post)

This is a fascinating story. It's funny though how, with compromised accounts at a highly reputable university and a 0-day exploit in one of the most-used pieces of software out there, they still managed to make basic grammatical errors in their phishing email. I mean, these people were clearly not messing around. Their attack(s) were highly targeted. And yet they still didn't check their written english!

If it hasn't already been tried, perhaps it's worth building a spam-blocker which checks for bad grammar and increases the spam score for every mistake found.

👤scotchmi_st🕑6y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

Besides the possibility that the mistakes were made deliberately, like other comments said, I can totally see how these two mistakes slipped through.

> He was also lucky that I didn’t care that he’d missed a “the” in We need your assistance in evaluating several projects for Adam Smith Prize.

Slavic languages, like Russian, don't have articles. In my experience the proper use of definite and indefinite articles is the most typical error native Slavic language speakers make.

> Apparently I further didn’t care that he’d unnecessarily capitalized the word Organizers in Adam Smith Prize Organizers, or that he didn’t seem to understand that a paragraph can contain more than a single sentence.

German capitalizes all nouns and German and English have plenty of nouns that are close enough that it's hard not get confused. Add to that all the exceptions where you do capitalize words in English, this is a hard problem for Germans.

My armchair linguists bet is that the mail was written by a German with Slavic roots.

👤weinzierl🕑6y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

I once read a theory that poor grammar, particularly with 419 scams, acts as a sort of gullibility filter where only the most susceptible targets will respond.
👤davb🕑6y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

I read in the past that this was intentional - it's a filter to ensure that people who are inclined to note detail pass up on the offer, meaning they only get the most likely prospects to be ripped off.
👤djaychela🕑6y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

To your initial point, I assume that you're immediately thinking of a sloppy-writing person who's first language is English, as opposed to a hacker who learnt English as a second language. With the latter, it wouldn't be surprising that they spent less time learning a foreign language than learning about the technology that they're trying to attack
👤mrmattyboy🕑6y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

Can any of you recommend a way to create a sandbox that can seal off processes within a computer?

One option is to use a VPC on a cloud-hosted machine to access whatever emails, links, websites someone sends you, but this can be time-consuming and costs money.

This article claims that Docker would also not be a good solution:

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/107850/docker-a...

"...container solutions do not and never will do guarantee to provide complete isolation, use virtualization instead if you require this."

So is there any other way to create a sealed off sandbox on your own machine that would create a type of moat between your machine and your adversary?

👤antiviral🕑6y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

Dropping 'the' is a common error for Russians writing English. It's part of how the 2016 election meddling was blamed on the Russians.
👤robrenaud🕑6y🔼0🗨️0