Too Many Toads: Lost in Translation
The perils of machine translation, the importance of dates, and how cultural and linguistic nuances cast new light on the Conti ransomware group
As the Natto Team pointed out in a previous posting, understanding cyber threat actors is like solving a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle; it works best when the whole cybersecurity community shares insights, clues and research ideas. The Natto Team has seen many great cyber threat intelligence reports that nevertheless feel frustrating. These reports provide screenshots and quotations that offer valuable glimpses of the methods and motives of cyber threat actors….but they contain outright mistakes because they rely on machine-translated text. Or they fail to provide dates and foreign-language original text that researchers with language and country knowledge can analyze. This is understandable: reports are often written under great time pressure, and laborious final tasks such as providing dates and original-language texts fall by the wayside. But without them, we are wasting valuable clues that could contribute to understanding and protecting against cyber threats.
