• @[email protected]
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    916 months ago

    Thought that seemed really cute. Nice way to try to break through social anxiety.

    Then I saw that it started as a wrong number message. Then I realised…

    Damn scam bots!

  • @[email protected]
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    566 months ago

    In the future, bots are going to get so annoyed with people pretending to be bots when they just want to talk to other bots!

  • @[email protected]
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    516 months ago

    why bother with the variations?

    think they’re hoping to knock the same victim more than once?

    messed up

    • Deebster
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      866 months ago

      Maybe it’s an attempt to evade automated systems that check for spam.

    • @[email protected]
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      666 months ago

      Probably a basic way to evade spam detection. If you start sending the exact same message to 500 people, most chat services will shut that shit down in an instant. But if you send unique messages, it makes you look more like a real person, and the chat system may let it slide.

      • @[email protected]
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        96 months ago

        What’s bad is that modern spam detection can employ semantic algorithms so it would still catch all of them as the I’m as message. The use of synonyms in the optionals is a huge vulnerability in the scam.

    • @[email protected]
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      306 months ago

      So that their fixed script isn’t so predictable that we can just nuke them by looking for identical conversations.

    • @[email protected]
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      56 months ago

      Could be to match the style of the target, to try and make the conversation feel more natural for them.

    • @Lmaydev
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      56 months ago

      I would say more likely to get around bot protection.

  • @[email protected]
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    446 months ago

    How does this exploit work? I understand that inputs were not sanitized, but what did the injected code do?

    • @[email protected]
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      686 months ago

      My guess would be the response text is passed through a rudimentary templating engine that looks for { and }. Somehow it must be processing the whole chat history. The templater fails at the unexpected braces in the code block and then just gives up (probably a try-catch ignores the error and sends the message anyway).

    • @[email protected]
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      6 months ago

      I don’t think the code is doing anything, it looks like it might be the brackets.

      That effectively the spam script has like a greedy template matcher that is trying to template the user message with the brackets and either (a) chokes on an exception so that the rest is spit out with no templating processor, or (b) completes so that it doesn’t apply templating to the other side of the conversation.

      So { a :'b'} might work instead.