When Dame Sally Mapstone, the newly appointed principal of St Andrews University, banned her fellow academics from starting emails with “I hope this finds you well”, she did not expect it would one day ouwit hackers from the Russian state.
But six years later, the ban on the cliched phrase did just that when Phillips O’Brien, head of the university’s School of International Relations and one of the world’s foremost authorities on the war in Ukraine, received an email from a colleague that began with the outlawed phrase last week.
