it doesn't feel that scary to me -- it essentially took 5 mistakes to hit the payload. That'd a pretty wide berth as far as phishing attacks go.
The scariest "user support" email I've received
111–120 of 267 posts
Re: The scariest "user support" email I've received
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the personal website that would be casually hosted whenever your PC is on I don't think that was ever really a thing. Which isn't to say that no one did it, but it was never a common practice. And free web site hosting came earlier than you're implying - sites like Tripod and Angelfire launched in the mid-1990s, at a time when most users were still on dialup.
earliest of the three, GeoCities launched in 1994
For added context, geocities was started before Netscape Navigator was launched, and geocities was actually launched before Internet Explorer 1.0.
Re: The scariest "user support" email I've received
#113> as ChatGPT confirmed when I asked it to analyze it lol we are so cooked
Isn't analysing and writing bits of code one of the few things LLMs are actually good at and useful for (as opposed to creative writing or whatever). Before LLMs if someone wasn't familiar with deobfuscation they would have no easy way to analyse the attack string as they were able to do here.
Providing some analysis? sure. Confirming anything? no.
Re: The scariest "user support" email I've received
#114Pretty clever to host the malware on a sites.google.com domain, makes it look way more trustworthy.
Google should probably stop allowing people to add content under that address.
Re: The scariest "user support" email I've received
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was this a mistake too? >The command they had copied to my clipboard was this but couldn't someone attack here? you think you're selecting a small bit of text but actually copying something much larger into the clipboard that "overflows" into memory? (sorry not my area so i don't know if this is feasible)
The engineers who wrote your browser already thought of this and made sure it wouldn't work. In case anyone mocks you for this, though, it's not a stupid question at all : there have been 1-click and 0-click attacks with vectors barely more sophisticated than this. But I feel 100% confident that in 2025 no browser can be exploited just by copying a malicious string.
>But I feel 100% confident that in 2025 no browser can be exploited just by copying a malicious string.
that's a real far leap. Most OS have a shared clipboard, and a lot of them run processes that watch the thing for events. That attack surface is so large that 100% certainty is a very hard sell to me.
Just for the sake of arguement, say clipboard_manager.sh sees a malicious string copied from a site by the browser to the system clipboard that somehow poisons that process. clipboard_manager.sh then proceeds to exfiltrate browser data via the OS/fs rather than via the browser process at all, starts keylogging (trivial in most nix), and just for the sake of throwing gas on the fire it joins the local adversarial botnet and starts churnin captchas or coins or whatever.
Was the browser exploited? ehh. no -- but it most definitely facilitated the attack by which it became victimized. It feels like semantics at that point.
Re: The scariest "user support" email I've received
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs are just as bad at code as "creative writing or whatever". It's just that fewer people know how to write/smell code at the same level as prose, so we get drowned out as "anti-AI" cynics and the lie continues.
But chatGPT was correct in this case, so you are indeed being cynical.
That doesn’t logically follow. It got this very straightforward thing correct; that doesn’t prove their response was cynical. It sounds like they know what they’re talking about.
A couple of times per month I give Gemini a try at work, and it is good at some things and bad at others. If there is a confusing compiler error, it will usually point me in the right direction faster than I could figure it out myself.
However, when it tries to debug a complex problem it jumps to conclusion after conclusion “a-ha now I DEFINTELY understand the problem”. Sometimes it has an OK idea (worth checking out, but not conclusive yet), and sometimes it has very bad ideas. Most times, after I humor it by gathering further info that debunks its hypotheses, it gives up.
Re: The scariest "user support" email I've received
#117> as ChatGPT confirmed when I asked it to analyze it lol we are so cooked
just feed the thing to any base64 decoder like cyberchef:
https://cyberchef.org/#recipe=From_Base64('A-Za-z0-9%2B/%3D'...
Isn't it just basic problem solving skill? We gonna let AI do the thinky bit for us now?
Re: The scariest "user support" email I've received
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
ChatGPT didn’t download anything, hopefully. The we’re cooked refers to the fact of using ChatGPT to decode the base64 command. That’s like using ChatGPT to solve a simple equation like 4*12, especially for a developer. There are tons of base64 decoder if don’t want to write that one liner yourself.
So what? Why not use the everything machine for everything? You have it open anyway, it’s a fast copy-paste.
> You have it open anyway
Imagine being this way. Hence "we're cooked".
Re: The scariest "user support" email I've received
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
But chatGPT was correct in this case, so you are indeed being cynical.
That doesn’t logically follow. It got this very straightforward thing correct; that doesn’t prove their response was cynical. It sounds like they know what they’re talking about. A couple of times per month I give Gemini a try at work, and it is good at some things and bad at others. If there is a confusing compiler error, it will usually point me in the right direction faster than I could figure it out myself. Howev…
Keep in mind that some LLMs are better than others. I have experienced this "Aha! Now I definitely understand the problem" quite often with Gemini and GPT. Much more than I have with Claude, although not unheard of, of course... but I have went back and forth with the first two... Pasted the error -> Response from LLM "Aha! Now I definitely understand the problem" -> Pasted new error -> ... ad infinitum.
Re: The scariest "user support" email I've received
#120> as ChatGPT confirmed when I asked it to analyze it lol we are so cooked
The entire closing paragraph that suggested “AI did this” was weird.
My best guess is they meant the email contents (the "natural at first glance"), but it has several grammar mistakes that make it look ESL and not AI.