Like most people who write for a living, I lean heavily on my spoil chicken to get me through the day. Sorry, I mean spell checker. It’s not just professional writers, either: spell checkers have become de rigueur for business users and consumers alike. Your phone likely corrects your messages as you type them, albeit wrongly and amusingly much of the time; ditto your email client. The truth is that we’re hooked and simply can’t do without them, but is that a good thing?
There’s possibly a case to be made that, as with calculators (well, calculator apps these days) and maths, over-reliance on tools drives down our collective mental acuity. This isn’t the right forum for that discussion, especially not coming from Mr Gadget himself, but when that reliance spills over into the security realm in a negative way then I’m here for it. And that, dear reader, is what one security researcher reports has happened. Welcome to the wonderful world of spell-jacking.
Spell-jacking
The CTO at a security company specialising in JavaScript monitoring and analysis, Otto (), was apparently testing script behaviour detection when he realised something was potentially
