How the Syrian Electronic Army Hacked The Onion
theonion.github.io
How the Syrian Electronic Army Hacked The Onion
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Re: How the Syrian Electronic Army Hacked The Onion
#2One more reason to use 2FA on your Google Apps account.
Re: How the Syrian Electronic Army Hacked The Onion
#3> "Please read the following article for its importance"
This immediately hit my brain's bayesian classifier like a ton of bricks. Or as the saying goes, "If spammers ever learn proper English, god help us all."
* the English is actually proper, but the wording is unusual
Re: How the Syrian Electronic Army Hacked The Onion
#4> "Please read the following article for its importance" This immediately hit my brain's bayesian classifier like a ton of bricks. Or as the saying goes, "If spammers ever learn proper English, god help us all." * the English is actually proper, but the wording is unusual
A few minutes of searching and I couldn't immediately find it but, if I recall correctly, it's actually intentionally incorrect as poor grammar comes off as folksy and more trustworthy and leads to more clicks.
Re: How the Syrian Electronic Army Hacked The Onion
#5> "Please read the following article for its importance" This immediately hit my brain's bayesian classifier like a ton of bricks. Or as the saying goes, "If spammers ever learn proper English, god help us all." * the English is actually proper, but the wording is unusual
+1, this phrasing immediately triggers my brain's spam alert. It's not simply a "familiar" kind of phrasing friends or teenagers would use to make communication shorter - it's just that kind of mistake scam emails tend to be full of, for some reason.
Re: How the Syrian Electronic Army Hacked The Onion
#6> "Please read the following article for its importance" This immediately hit my brain's bayesian classifier like a ton of bricks. Or as the saying goes, "If spammers ever learn proper English, god help us all." * the English is actually proper, but the wording is unusual
Yeah, unusual (oddly formal, non-colloquial, weird syntax) English is usually the best giveaway.
That said, spammers and phishers are getting better and better. I've seen some "Apple" emails that looked almost quasi-legit to my weary eyes at 2am, say, but which revealed themselves as laughably bad upon closer inspection of the writing and the email addresses.
We should assume that phishing attempts will continue to improve in writing quality, use of plausible email addresses, and mimicry of email templates from legitimate sources. But some things will never change, because they are fundamental to the phishing playbook: seeking credentials, linking, etc.
Re: How the Syrian Electronic Army Hacked The Onion
#7You can imagine the tech team at the Onion feeling a race against time before their editorial team managed to so infuriate the attackers that the situation got out of control.
Re: How the Syrian Electronic Army Hacked The Onion
#8[deleted]
Re: How the Syrian Electronic Army Hacked The Onion
#9I often think about creating a browser and email plugin/extension to help with this:
- Look at all link tags.
- If it looks like a URL (has a scheme at the beginning, or something which resembles a hostname, or a bunch of path or query parameters), inspect the actual link.
- If they have different hosts, warn the user, and perhaps give them the option of just visiting what the contents of the link tag say (rather than the href attribute).
- Maybe do some magic with onclick events too.
I don't care that it wont be right 100% of the time. I don't care that some times I'll be warned when in fact it is perfectly fine. What I do care about is that when I click a link, I go to that link.
It would be quite helpful for attacks like this, but I'm also interested from a privacy perspective.
Google, Facebook and others go to great lengths so that when you mouse over a link, it looks like it will take you directly to the webpage it says it will, but actually redirects via themselves first. I often find myself copying a url from Facebook and pasting into the address bar, because I don't want them to know which articles I read (yes, I know, if I'm that paranoid, I probably shouldn't use Facebook, blah, blah).
Re: How the Syrian Electronic Army Hacked The Onion
#10You can imagine the tech team at the Onion feeling a race against time before their editorial team managed to so infuriate the attackers that the situation got out of control.
Accurate. On one hand, we didn't want to fuel the fire, but on the other, that inflammatory article forced the attacker to reveal their hand. So it was actually to our benefit, strangely enough.