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I was seven words away from being spear-phished

robertheaton.com

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Re: I was seven words away from being spear-phished

#131

Post by feanaro »

dheera wrote: post #118

Funny that the browser that has been selling so much on privacy falls victim to such a vulnerability. In any case, if a site says "this site must be viewed in Firefox" that would be a huge red flag, and all the more reason for me to leave. There aren't really any features in Firefox that other browsers don't have.

> Funny that the browser that has been selling so much on privacy falls victim to such a vulnerability.

All browsers fall to such vulnerabilities -- Chrome had one in March this year. The difference is that some browsers (again, Chrome) are malicious by design instead of only by accident.

Re: I was seven words away from being spear-phished

#132

Post by newsoul2019 »

antiviral wrote: post #129
scotchmi_st wrote: post #34

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'…

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 n…

That's what Java applets were supposed to be originally, they were supposed to run in a sandbox....

Re: I was seven words away from being spear-phished

#133

Post by tempodox »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #106
fwip wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Foreign language speakers aren't stupid. You can Google "famous school England" in any language. There's no "second step" to this con. You don't have to get tricked into wiring them money. If you visit the page, you lose.

Exactly, they’re not stupid. So you’d expect them to use a spell checker if they intended for the attack to have a high success rate on English speakers. There may have been a second step for the attackers goals after the zero day, e.g. ransomware or some other social engineering

A spell checker still doesn't detect faulty grammar.

Re: I was seven words away from being spear-phished

#134

Post by abrowne »

gruez wrote: post #39
hackinthebochs wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard of at least one case where money was transferred out of someone's bank account through online banking and he was held liable. The user claimed fraud but since the intruder used his username and password the bank refused to refund the money claiming he had a responsibility to secure his username and password.

>since the intruder used his username and password the bank refused to refund the money claiming he had a responsibility to secure his username and password what jurisdiction is this? this seems like the worse consumer protection law ever.

Especially if the password could only be 8 letters or something, like a lot of banks have to deal with old systems.

Re: I was seven words away from being spear-phished

#136

Post by vkou »

hdfbdtbcdg wrote: post #127
WalterBright wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The kind of mistakes a non-native English speaker makes tend to be different than ones an uneducated native speaker does.

I think that lack of an article 'the' is typical of native speakers of Slavic languages?

It is. It took my father ~20 years of working in an English-speaking country to be consistent with his usage of that article.

Re: I was seven words away from being spear-phished

#137

Post by sudo_groot »

antiviral wrote: post #129
scotchmi_st wrote: post #34

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'…

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 n…

If you are interested you should check out Qubes OS: https://www.qubes-os.org/

It uses xen hypervisor to then launch separate VMs for your different applications. Not an OS for everyone but I have been running it for some time and have had a good experience with it.

Re: I was seven words away from being spear-phished

#138

Post by hyperpape »

antiviral wrote: post #129
scotchmi_st wrote: post #34

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'…

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 n…

I believe this is the idea behind Qubes OS. Any virtualization system (virtualbox or whatnot) should give you some protection, at the cost of some convenience.

Running with javascript disabled except on a small set of sites will also help protect against many attacks.

Re: I was seven words away from being spear-phished

#139

Post by hyperpape »

newsoul2019 wrote: post #132
antiviral wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

That's what Java applets were supposed to be originally, they were supposed to run in a sandbox....

Not all sandboxes are created equal. Modern browsers have much better sandboxes than Java ever has had. OS level virtualization is even better.

Re: I was seven words away from being spear-phished

#140

Post by Cpoll »

davb wrote: post #50
bonyt wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s likely true for the Nigerian prince scammers, but when they’ve got a browser zero day, they can successfully attack people that aren’t suckers.

True, but we don't know the next stage of their attack. Perhaps after compromising the target's machine the attackers would have to then engage in some social engineering.

They're targetting Coinbase employees and users, the logical next step is just to find the wallet file on the machine and steal the coin.
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