THE WAR ON
BACKTICKS &
QUOTATION MARKS

The Four Characters

System Breach Report

Compromised Nodes

Confirmed Attacks

# Corrupted payload (curly quotes)
message = “Hello, world”
# SyntaxError: invalid character ‘“’ (U+201C)

# Decontaminated (straight quotes)
message = "Hello, world"

// Corrupted: acute accent instead of backtick
const greeting = ´Hello, ${name}´;
// SyntaxError: Unexpected token ILLEGAL

// Decontaminated: real backticks
const greeting = `Hello, ${name}`;

// Corrupted: curly quotes in JSON
{ “name”: “UCO Agent” }
// SyntaxError: Unexpected token \u201C

{ "name": "UCO Agent" }

# Corrupted: smart quotes around path
cd “/home/user/projects”
# bash: cd: \xe2\x80\x9c/home/user/projects\xe2\x80\x9d: No such file

cd "/home/user/projects"

/* Corrupted: curly quotes in font-family */
font-family: “Fira Code”, monospace;
/* Browser silently ignores the entire rule */

font-family: "Fira Code", monospace;

CLASSIFIED: The Microsoft Incident

Interactive Tools

Countermeasures

• PATCH 001
  VS Code Extensions

  Install Gremlins Tracker to highlight invisible and confusable Unicode characters. Pair with Smart Quotes Normalizer to auto-replace curly quotes on paste.
• PATCH 002
  Linting Protocols

  ESLint flags unexpected Unicode. Python 3 SyntaxError messages now show the exact bad character. yamllint catches curly quotes in YAML config files.
• PATCH 003
  WordPress Immunization

  Add to functions.php: remove_filter('the_content', 'wptexturize'); and remove_filter('the_title', 'wptexturize'); — disables the auto-curling engine.
• PATCH 004
  macOS Firewall

  System Settings → Keyboard → Text Input → Input Sources → Edit... → Disable Use smart quotes and dashes. Requires per-user configuration.
• PATCH 005
  Manual Decontamination

  Find & Replace in any editor: search for \u201C \u201D \u2018 \u2019 \u00B4 and replace with their ASCII counterparts. Or use the Decontamination Chamber above.
• ANOMALY
  PowerShell

  PowerShell treats curly quotes as valid string delimiters. “Hello” actually works. REASON: UNKNOWN. The UCO considers this a containment failure. Do not rely on this behavior.

Quick Reference