10 ms·

Gone (Almost) Phishin'

184 points by luu 6mo ago

voidUpdate 6mo ago
Whats at the bottom of the page? It looks like it's meant to be brushstrokes or something?
- ErneX 6mo ago
  Yes, same as the logo / header.
hk__2 6mo ago
Previous submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47388201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47388201
firstrulephish 6mo ago
For the record, Apple will never call you first, but other services might. The REAL first rule of not being scammed should be stated "Thanks for the concern, I will call you right back" If your bank calls you, you turn off the call and call them. Don't take suggestions for contact address. You look them up, and you call them. Don't elaborate. The scammer is either and idiot and will try to call you telling to stop, or smart and fuck off. And if it was the bank, they'll at best, pick right back from where you left it, and at worst, learn better from the event.
olmo23 6mo ago
I told my parents: if they are ever called by anyone, to tell them "now is not a good time, please give me a case number and I'll call back when I do have the time." And then, this is important, look up the number for the customer service hotline online. I feel like this is a simple solution that works 100% of the time.
- argee 6mo ago
  Mike Tyson once said "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth". I think you are underestimating the underhanded tactics and emotional tools available to scammers to keep you on the line.
  - dspillett 6mo ago
    When I'm at home with the old man (mam is unfortunately in a care home), it _really_ irritates me how many scam calls he gets some days. Most of them are obvious: they just hang up when you pick up, the line is very bad or the caller is otherwise barely intelligible (i.e. they are speaking their 4th language), they refer to an account that doesn't exist or a fictitious government agency. But the occasional one is very smooth, and sometimes even have a few details about Dad's life and/or accounts that give pause (either of the form “could this actually be real” or “I wonder how have they collected and associated that?”). If my family are anything to go by, they definitely target the elderly more than even one generation down (so it isn't just due to those of the younger generations often only having mobile phones and landlines are more targeted) because they know those tend to be more susceptible to the con and more likely to have some savings worth pillaging. Also in DayJob, some of our C*s and others associated with them (PAs, office managers) have seen some pretty sophisticated phishing attempts, both targeting the business's dealings and their personal accounts. I get the impression that these are reducing in number ATM (or the filtering of them is improving) but that those coming in are making an increasing effort to be convincing.
    - razakel 6mo ago
      It may be worth looking into getting him a phone that only allows trusted numbers to call him. But regarding scammers, asking "is your mother proud that she raised a thief?" really annoys them. One of them threatened to come over and rape my sister. I don't have a sister.
- e40 6mo ago
  My dad googled “amex phone number” and called the first result. I spent most of a Saturday cleaning up after the scammers. I told him, next time call the number on the back of your card.
  - ValentineC 6mo ago
    [dead]
  - MaxGabriel 6mo ago
    Any chance the first result was an ad? Those are definitely a popular phishing distribution mechanism, so getting your parents an adblocker could help
    - qingcharles 6mo ago
      I just got a family member to install one after they Google'd a hotel name and accidentally clicked the first ad instead of the hotel site.
    - e40 6mo ago
      Likely. I had him setup with uBO but sometimes it would bork a website so he disabled it, I think. Then, one day I screen shared with him and he's using Safari! He claims he had always used Safari. :/ He doesn't really even understand what a browser is. Or a tab. Once I screen shared and he had like 30 gmail tabs in Safari. :o
- dspillett 6mo ago
  Another top tip is how to response to “can I just confirm”. No, they can't just confirm any details, until they have confirmed who they are, which they can't do without us calling them on the company's published support number. Luckily my parents are appropriately cynical and have not fallen for anything like that, but I know a couple of people of my generation who have (in the worst case losing 5K+ in savings, back when there was no onus on UK banks to take any responsibility for such fraud through their systems so it was properly lost to them).
JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
> Apple Support lives on apple.com and getsupport.apple.com, nowhere else. Meanwhile: “Microsoft support uses the following domains to send emails: microsoft.com microsoftsupport.com mail.support.microsoft.com office365support.com techsupport.microsoft.com” [1] [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/azure/general/email-domains-support-agent https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/azure/general...
- throwaway290 6mo ago
  That's just for support. Legit password resets for example come from more random top level domains with "microsoft" in it, like microsoftonline.com Another fun one is facebook, they use facebookmail.com or whatever else for serious security stuff
  - e40 6mo ago
    The number of redirects while using ms properties is just insane. It makes white listing them in uBO impossible because they redirect so fast, through multiple domains. The White listing is needed to sometimes make them work.
    - throwaway290 6mo ago
      It's a thing with google and facebook too. If you login to youtube or go to facebook account settings, at least 3 redirects through very random places. I guess 3 is not a lot compared to microsoft's 15.
  - CraigRood 6mo ago
    Is this because at one point <username>@facebook.com was a valid communication method? Great concept to be fair, but once you pull back the first layer you can immediately see its problems.
  - Metacelsus 6mo ago
    >Legit password resets for example come from more random top level domains with "microsoft" in it, like microsoftonline.com Or aka.ms
mentalgear 6mo ago
This scam is scarily well made and what terrifies me is how easily scalable it is across sectors (e.g. your bank) and with AI voice clones (like in the attached video they mentioned the new 11lab generation).
maplethorpe 6mo ago
The scammer sounds Australian, but he pronounces mobile as "mobil", like an American. I wonder if he's doing that intentionally to provide cover, or if he's worked with Americans so much in the past that it's changed his pronunciation.
- wateralien 6mo ago
  The pause in replies also suggests he's not around the corner.
ChrisMarshallNY 6mo ago
Phishing has gotten really good, lately. As he noted, they will often re-use legit templates from the actual corporation. The email will be 99.9% legit, with maybe only one link being dodgy. I don’t think they can pass DMARC, though. My wife was almost scammed, a few years ago. What tipped her off, was how extremely good the “tech support” was. Real tech support is generally someone on a scratchy line, with a heavy accent, following an inappropriate script. Even after she backed away, they sent a few followup snail mails, looking somewhat legit (cheap printer).
- zbentley 6mo ago
  I interpreted the post as saying the support emails were legitimate, opened fraudulently (or at least some were) as pretext for the phishing phone call.
- smsm42 6mo ago
  It's sad how often the best way to recognize a scam is "the real company would never care that much about me or my account".
tom-blk 6mo ago
This is actually quite impressive and concerning
xnx 6mo ago
audit-apple.com is offline now. Is that something ICANN does, and if so, can they fix zombo.com?
- chuckadams 6mo ago
  ICANN doesn't do that, individual registrars do. ICANN can suspend a registrar's accreditation if they don't act on spam/scam domains brought to their attention, which is something they do at the dizzying frequency of never.
- rererereferred 6mo ago
  I've gotten phishing domains taken down by going to their registrar and filling a support ticket.
metalman 6mo ago
Currently my device has no passwords, and the only apps that lead to anything personal are browsers, and then sign into my website/email. I have eliminated online banking, except for allowing people to pay me through direct deposit, which I confirm on my once a week trip to an actual bank. Very occasional online purchases use a dedicated credit card. The above, I believe makes me a smol, challenging target, and I use the many many attempts to fish through, text, email, and voice, as practice sessions to refine my customer faceing presence, and answer all calls, and chearfully deflect anything or anyone that is not a legitimate human and/or customer, in under 10 seconds. Going forward I would train any office helpers to use the same methods on any work devices.
haar 6mo ago
Thank you for writing this up (and getting it put into a video). I sent this blog post to my parents and my mum has decided to forward it on to all of her friends after watching. Seems easily digestible and approachable for a specific target audience.
jasode 6mo ago
>When you get an email from Apple—or, really, anyone telling you to complete a digital security measure—check the URL they’re trying to send you to. Apple Support lives on apple.com and getsupport.apple.com, nowhere else. That advice is fine for the technically savvy but doesn't work for a lot of normal people who don't have the knowledge to mentally parse urls. https://getsupport.apple.com/customer?cvid=8c11bcc71f684b6ab405d4fa1e86c146 https://getsupport.apple.com.phish.xyz/customer?cvid=8c11bcc71f684b6ab405d4fa1e86c146 People just pattern match on the substring "apple.com" because they don't understand that the DNS system works right-to-left. Therefore, the 2nd url looks just as "legitimate" as the first one. I work with senior citizens and tried to explain how to parse the domain in the URL by looking for the first forward "/" after the "https://" and then scan backwards but they find that mental algorithm confusing and those instructions don't stick. (This is actually an area where some AI on phones/desktops could assist people decipher urls or mark them as suspicious.) The other problem with that advice is people can't "whitelist" the legitimate domains to look for because they don't know ahead-of-time what they are. E.g.: - An Amazon verification email will be sent from "account-update@amazon.com". It's intuitive to predict something coming from "@amazon.com" so a mental whitelist filter works in that case. - However, State Farm Insurance legitimate login verification codes are actually sent from "noreply@sfauthentication.com" instead of the expected "@statefarm.com"
- basilikum 6mo ago
  It is unfortunately normal for companies to impersonate scammers. We can teach people as much as we want about security against phishing. It won't matter because people have to break these rules constantly. Companies actively train people to fall for phishing by doing everything in their power to be indistinguishable from phishing themselves.
  - microtonal 6mo ago
    The worst are DHL, UPS, etc. customs payment mails. Even the real ones look like phishing mails and in some cases they don’t link the payment request to your account, so you cannot circumvent it by logging into your account and checking wether it is legit.
valzam 6mo ago
As others have mentioned, one big issue is that every company does these things differently and just because someone texts you a link doesn't mean it's phishing, even though it feels shady. In Australia I have had calls by immigration officers on supressed numbers that wanted PII over the phone without being able to tell me what the purpose of the call is.
- seb1204 6mo ago
  Wow, this is tricky. Even though you can look up the official number you will likely not get through to the same person.
WhyNotHugo 6mo ago
What's the end goal here? I know that after a phone has been stolen, attackers want to gain access to an Apple account to remove the activation lock. But in this case, no devices had been stolen yet. The most they could do would be to… remotely mark the devices as stolen? Then ask the victim to pay to unlock them?
- sdwr 6mo ago
  Get into the account, change the phone number, and start charging the cards on file. Or look through iCloud data for passwords/contacts
dinkleberg 6mo ago
I’ve found that just not answering any calls from unknown numbers (and having my phone just silence those calls so I don’t even see them) prevents all of this. If the caller is legitimate (e.g., new dentist office regarding an appointment) they can leave a voicemail. And if it isn’t spam and they aren’t willing to leave a voicemail and have me call the back, it probably wasn’t important in the first place. Sure, I may be missing out on some opportunities. But the peace of mind is far greater.
- seb1204 6mo ago
  This, my pixel marks almost all calls not in my address book as suspected spam or phishing.
- thedanbob 6mo ago
  Seconded. Even if one unknown number call isn't a scam, they will almost certainly pass on your number to ones that are. I made the mistake of answering one last week and since then I've been absolutely drowned in spam calls. Some of them even call a second time immediately after the first attempt, presumably to try to break through DND.
dude250711 6mo ago
Google users are safe from this, as neither the fraudster nor the potential victim would be able to contact their support to begin with.
- emmelaich 6mo ago
  I believe this is actually part of the intent.
- qingcharles 6mo ago
  I can't even get into my own damned account with the username, password and recovery email.
whywhywhywhy 6mo ago
Apple let someone in India a place I have never been to, Apple knows I've never been to log into an old Apple account I'd forgotten about and hadn't logged into for 12 years with a password from a leak. All I got was "Your apple account has been linked to a new mac in India". Disgusting to me that even the most basic of logic for what would be someone stealing an account: has the account been used in years, would this person we have location data for ever be in India setting up a new computer, with a computer type ID we know is compromised to hackintoshes (iMac Pro) wasn't enough of a red flag to send me an email confirmation first. Luckily the account was so old iCloud barely stored anything back then but still shocking to me.
ShowalkKama 6mo ago
step 1) use a password mamager step 2) forget your own password step 3) witness the password mamager NOT autofill on phishing sites
Cider9986 6mo ago
Having identifiers where anyone can initiate conversation is the problem. Modern messengers like Signal or SimpleX allow you to share one-time contact info, completely preventing anyone you don't allow to contact you. Besides that, people should sign up with random email aliases just as much as they sign up with random passwords. Here is a free crossplatform workflow: New, free Proton Mail[1]-->Free Bitwarden[2] account with single master password memorized[3]-->duck.com[4] alias pointing at Proton Mail-->Extract[5] duck.com api key to generate random duck.com alias for each site in Bitwarden-->Sign up for new service using new random email+password in seconds and never have to remember it and no spam. Here is a simple crossplatform workflow: Paid proton suite[6]-->Single memorized master password[3]-->Generate random email alias and password for new services using proton pass. If you use iCloud+ you can generate email aliases using a Raycast[7] extension or a browser extension[8] or inside of safari natively. There is also iCloud+ settings, but that is a pain to get to. [1] https://proton.me/mail https://proton.me/mail [2] https://bitwarden.com/go/start-free https://bitwarden.com/go/start-free [3] https://strongphrase.net https://strongphrase.net [4] https://duckduckgo.com/email https://duckduckgo.com/email [5] https://bitwarden.com/blog/how-to-use-the-bitwarden-forwarded-email-alias-generator https://bitwarden.com/blog/how-to-use-the-bitwarden-forwarde... [6] https://proton.me/mail/pricing https://proton.me/mail/pricing [7] https://www.raycast.com/svenhofman/hidemyemail https://www.raycast.com/svenhofman/hidemyemail [8] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/icloud-hide-my-email/omiaekblhgfopjkjnenhahfgcgnbohlk https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/icloud-hide-my-emai...
PaulHoule 6mo ago
Whenever I get some breathless email about security from my organization I send a phishing report for it even if I think it is real. All the messages about mandatory password resets and the like just increase the surface area for phishing. There should be a policy like "we will never send you an email about the security of your account" See https://www.ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-research/tech-at-ftc/2016/03/time-rethink-mandatory-password-changes https://www.ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-research/tech-at-ftc/201... a policy that's been talked about for more than 10 years and that the industry is almost catching up to.
jbellis 6mo ago
I've had some close calls already and with AI making it cheap to tailor scams to individuals it's probably only a matter of time. For my parents in their 70s, even more so. No amount of reminding them to read URLs first is going to help. So my question is: what are best practices to limit the blast radius when I (or they) inevitably click the wrong link?
emptybits 6mo ago
I had two calls from "Apple Support" very very much like this in the past two weeks. Both times, their claim was that someone was trying to reset my Apple password and they were trying to protect me. Both times, they asked me to go to a BS "apple-support" website and enter a six digit number they'd read out to me, where I'd see a transcript of this very phone call so I could then have full assurance that they were legit and working for Apple. Uh huh. And both times, when I asked them to just send me a quick email from their address at Apple (any address, even a generic inbox or support address) to assure me they worked for Apple ... pause ... [click]. Yeah.
twoodfin 6mo ago
Don’t approve any password-reset prompts—those are the first part of the attack. Do not pass Go, just head directly to your Apple ID settings. Why do I need to go to Settings? I get these occasionally and ignore them; what harm is there in that? FWIW these were real bad for a while, but Apple seems to have gotten better at canning the spam. Maybe 1-2 per year?
mattlondon 6mo ago
No mention of password managers yet? One of the major benefits is the password manager can do a quick, simple, completely deterministic check on the domain before providing the password. That would have stopped this dead in its tracks without relying on the human just happening to notice. I personally use bitwarden on my chrome profile across Windows Mac Linux and android and think it's great. Highly recommended. Of course I tell this to family and friends and no one does it so I dunno...
- WolfeReader 6mo ago
  Same. I've managed to convince exactly one person how great password managers are; the others just let Chrome handle it. (It's always Chrome.)
KomoD 6mo ago
This was easily one of the best phishing attempts I've ever seen.
daneel_w 6mo ago
Two years ago, over the course of two or three weeks, my girlfriend got several of these password reset requests popping up on her iOS devices. She uses a dedicated anonymous e-mail address for her Apple/iCloud account, which she never used for anything else on the Internet, making the event somewhat peculiar.

184 points by luu 6mo ago

voidUpdate 6mo ago

Whats at the bottom of the page? It looks like it's meant to be brushstrokes or something?

ErneX 6mo ago
Yes, same as the logo / header.

hk__2 6mo ago

Previous submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47388201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47388201

firstrulephish 6mo ago

For the record, Apple will never call you first, but other services might. The REAL first rule of not being scammed should be stated "Thanks for the concern, I will call you right back" If your bank calls you, you turn off the call and call them. Don't take suggestions for contact address. You look them up, and you call them. Don't elaborate. The scammer is either and idiot and will try to call you telling to stop, or smart and fuck off. And if it was the bank, they'll at best, pick right back from where you left it, and at worst, learn better from the event.

olmo23 6mo ago

I told my parents: if they are ever called by anyone, to tell them "now is not a good time, please give me a case number and I'll call back when I do have the time." And then, this is important, look up the number for the customer service hotline online. I feel like this is a simple solution that works 100% of the time.

argee 6mo ago
Mike Tyson once said "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth". I think you are underestimating the underhanded tactics and emotional tools available to scammers to keep you on the line.
- dspillett 6mo ago
  When I'm at home with the old man (mam is unfortunately in a care home), it _really_ irritates me how many scam calls he gets some days. Most of them are obvious: they just hang up when you pick up, the line is very bad or the caller is otherwise barely intelligible (i.e. they are speaking their 4th language), they refer to an account that doesn't exist or a fictitious government agency. But the occasional one is very smooth, and sometimes even have a few details about Dad's life and/or accounts that give pause (either of the form “could this actually be real” or “I wonder how have they collected and associated that?”). If my family are anything to go by, they definitely target the elderly more than even one generation down (so it isn't just due to those of the younger generations often only having mobile phones and landlines are more targeted) because they know those tend to be more susceptible to the con and more likely to have some savings worth pillaging. Also in DayJob, some of our C*s and others associated with them (PAs, office managers) have seen some pretty sophisticated phishing attempts, both targeting the business's dealings and their personal accounts. I get the impression that these are reducing in number ATM (or the filtering of them is improving) but that those coming in are making an increasing effort to be convincing.
  - razakel 6mo ago
    It may be worth looking into getting him a phone that only allows trusted numbers to call him. But regarding scammers, asking "is your mother proud that she raised a thief?" really annoys them. One of them threatened to come over and rape my sister. I don't have a sister.
e40 6mo ago
My dad googled “amex phone number” and called the first result. I spent most of a Saturday cleaning up after the scammers. I told him, next time call the number on the back of your card.
- ValentineC 6mo ago
  [dead]
- MaxGabriel 6mo ago
  Any chance the first result was an ad? Those are definitely a popular phishing distribution mechanism, so getting your parents an adblocker could help
  - qingcharles 6mo ago
    I just got a family member to install one after they Google'd a hotel name and accidentally clicked the first ad instead of the hotel site.
  - e40 6mo ago
    Likely. I had him setup with uBO but sometimes it would bork a website so he disabled it, I think. Then, one day I screen shared with him and he's using Safari! He claims he had always used Safari. :/ He doesn't really even understand what a browser is. Or a tab. Once I screen shared and he had like 30 gmail tabs in Safari. :o
dspillett 6mo ago
Another top tip is how to response to “can I just confirm”. No, they can't just confirm any details, until they have confirmed who they are, which they can't do without us calling them on the company's published support number. Luckily my parents are appropriately cynical and have not fallen for anything like that, but I know a couple of people of my generation who have (in the worst case losing 5K+ in savings, back when there was no onus on UK banks to take any responsibility for such fraud through their systems so it was properly lost to them).

JumpCrisscross 6mo ago

> Apple Support lives on apple.com and getsupport.apple.com, nowhere else. Meanwhile: “Microsoft support uses the following domains to send emails: microsoft.com microsoftsupport.com mail.support.microsoft.com office365support.com techsupport.microsoft.com” [1] [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/azure/general/email-domains-support-agent https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/azure/general...

throwaway290 6mo ago
That's just for support. Legit password resets for example come from more random top level domains with "microsoft" in it, like microsoftonline.com Another fun one is facebook, they use facebookmail.com or whatever else for serious security stuff
- e40 6mo ago
  The number of redirects while using ms properties is just insane. It makes white listing them in uBO impossible because they redirect so fast, through multiple domains. The White listing is needed to sometimes make them work.
  - throwaway290 6mo ago
    It's a thing with google and facebook too. If you login to youtube or go to facebook account settings, at least 3 redirects through very random places. I guess 3 is not a lot compared to microsoft's 15.
- CraigRood 6mo ago
  Is this because at one point <username>@facebook.com was a valid communication method? Great concept to be fair, but once you pull back the first layer you can immediately see its problems.
- Metacelsus 6mo ago
  >Legit password resets for example come from more random top level domains with "microsoft" in it, like microsoftonline.com Or aka.ms

mentalgear 6mo ago

This scam is scarily well made and what terrifies me is how easily scalable it is across sectors (e.g. your bank) and with AI voice clones (like in the attached video they mentioned the new 11lab generation).

maplethorpe 6mo ago

The scammer sounds Australian, but he pronounces mobile as "mobil", like an American. I wonder if he's doing that intentionally to provide cover, or if he's worked with Americans so much in the past that it's changed his pronunciation.

wateralien 6mo ago
The pause in replies also suggests he's not around the corner.

ChrisMarshallNY 6mo ago

Phishing has gotten really good, lately. As he noted, they will often re-use legit templates from the actual corporation. The email will be 99.9% legit, with maybe only one link being dodgy. I don’t think they can pass DMARC, though. My wife was almost scammed, a few years ago. What tipped her off, was how extremely good the “tech support” was. Real tech support is generally someone on a scratchy line, with a heavy accent, following an inappropriate script. Even after she backed away, they sent a few followup snail mails, looking somewhat legit (cheap printer).

zbentley 6mo ago
I interpreted the post as saying the support emails were legitimate, opened fraudulently (or at least some were) as pretext for the phishing phone call.
smsm42 6mo ago
It's sad how often the best way to recognize a scam is "the real company would never care that much about me or my account".

tom-blk 6mo ago

This is actually quite impressive and concerning

xnx 6mo ago

audit-apple.com is offline now. Is that something ICANN does, and if so, can they fix zombo.com?

chuckadams 6mo ago
ICANN doesn't do that, individual registrars do. ICANN can suspend a registrar's accreditation if they don't act on spam/scam domains brought to their attention, which is something they do at the dizzying frequency of never.
rererereferred 6mo ago
I've gotten phishing domains taken down by going to their registrar and filling a support ticket.

metalman 6mo ago

Currently my device has no passwords, and the only apps that lead to anything personal are browsers, and then sign into my website/email. I have eliminated online banking, except for allowing people to pay me through direct deposit, which I confirm on my once a week trip to an actual bank. Very occasional online purchases use a dedicated credit card. The above, I believe makes me a smol, challenging target, and I use the many many attempts to fish through, text, email, and voice, as practice sessions to refine my customer faceing presence, and answer all calls, and chearfully deflect anything or anyone that is not a legitimate human and/or customer, in under 10 seconds. Going forward I would train any office helpers to use the same methods on any work devices.

haar 6mo ago

Thank you for writing this up (and getting it put into a video). I sent this blog post to my parents and my mum has decided to forward it on to all of her friends after watching. Seems easily digestible and approachable for a specific target audience.

jasode 6mo ago

>When you get an email from Apple—or, really, anyone telling you to complete a digital security measure—check the URL they’re trying to send you to. Apple Support lives on apple.com and getsupport.apple.com, nowhere else. That advice is fine for the technically savvy but doesn't work for a lot of normal people who don't have the knowledge to mentally parse urls. https://getsupport.apple.com/customer?cvid=8c11bcc71f684b6ab405d4fa1e86c146 https://getsupport.apple.com.phish.xyz/customer?cvid=8c11bcc71f684b6ab405d4fa1e86c146 People just pattern match on the substring "apple.com" because they don't understand that the DNS system works right-to-left. Therefore, the 2nd url looks just as "legitimate" as the first one. I work with senior citizens and tried to explain how to parse the domain in the URL by looking for the first forward "/" after the "https://" and then scan backwards but they find that mental algorithm confusing and those instructions don't stick. (This is actually an area where some AI on phones/desktops could assist people decipher urls or mark them as suspicious.) The other problem with that advice is people can't "whitelist" the legitimate domains to look for because they don't know ahead-of-time what they are. E.g.: - An Amazon verification email will be sent from "account-update@amazon.com". It's intuitive to predict something coming from "@amazon.com" so a mental whitelist filter works in that case. - However, State Farm Insurance legitimate login verification codes are actually sent from "noreply@sfauthentication.com" instead of the expected "@statefarm.com"

basilikum 6mo ago
It is unfortunately normal for companies to impersonate scammers. We can teach people as much as we want about security against phishing. It won't matter because people have to break these rules constantly. Companies actively train people to fall for phishing by doing everything in their power to be indistinguishable from phishing themselves.
- microtonal 6mo ago
  The worst are DHL, UPS, etc. customs payment mails. Even the real ones look like phishing mails and in some cases they don’t link the payment request to your account, so you cannot circumvent it by logging into your account and checking wether it is legit.

valzam 6mo ago

As others have mentioned, one big issue is that every company does these things differently and just because someone texts you a link doesn't mean it's phishing, even though it feels shady. In Australia I have had calls by immigration officers on supressed numbers that wanted PII over the phone without being able to tell me what the purpose of the call is.

seb1204 6mo ago
Wow, this is tricky. Even though you can look up the official number you will likely not get through to the same person.

WhyNotHugo 6mo ago

What's the end goal here? I know that after a phone has been stolen, attackers want to gain access to an Apple account to remove the activation lock. But in this case, no devices had been stolen yet. The most they could do would be to… remotely mark the devices as stolen? Then ask the victim to pay to unlock them?

sdwr 6mo ago
Get into the account, change the phone number, and start charging the cards on file. Or look through iCloud data for passwords/contacts

dinkleberg 6mo ago

I’ve found that just not answering any calls from unknown numbers (and having my phone just silence those calls so I don’t even see them) prevents all of this. If the caller is legitimate (e.g., new dentist office regarding an appointment) they can leave a voicemail. And if it isn’t spam and they aren’t willing to leave a voicemail and have me call the back, it probably wasn’t important in the first place. Sure, I may be missing out on some opportunities. But the peace of mind is far greater.

seb1204 6mo ago
This, my pixel marks almost all calls not in my address book as suspected spam or phishing.
thedanbob 6mo ago
Seconded. Even if one unknown number call isn't a scam, they will almost certainly pass on your number to ones that are. I made the mistake of answering one last week and since then I've been absolutely drowned in spam calls. Some of them even call a second time immediately after the first attempt, presumably to try to break through DND.

dude250711 6mo ago

Google users are safe from this, as neither the fraudster nor the potential victim would be able to contact their support to begin with.

emmelaich 6mo ago
I believe this is actually part of the intent.
qingcharles 6mo ago
I can't even get into my own damned account with the username, password and recovery email.

whywhywhywhy 6mo ago

Apple let someone in India a place I have never been to, Apple knows I've never been to log into an old Apple account I'd forgotten about and hadn't logged into for 12 years with a password from a leak. All I got was "Your apple account has been linked to a new mac in India". Disgusting to me that even the most basic of logic for what would be someone stealing an account: has the account been used in years, would this person we have location data for ever be in India setting up a new computer, with a computer type ID we know is compromised to hackintoshes (iMac Pro) wasn't enough of a red flag to send me an email confirmation first. Luckily the account was so old iCloud barely stored anything back then but still shocking to me.

ShowalkKama 6mo ago

step 1) use a password mamager step 2) forget your own password step 3) witness the password mamager NOT autofill on phishing sites

Cider9986 6mo ago

Having identifiers where anyone can initiate conversation is the problem. Modern messengers like Signal or SimpleX allow you to share one-time contact info, completely preventing anyone you don't allow to contact you. Besides that, people should sign up with random email aliases just as much as they sign up with random passwords. Here is a free crossplatform workflow: New, free Proton Mail[1]-->Free Bitwarden[2] account with single master password memorized[3]-->duck.com[4] alias pointing at Proton Mail-->Extract[5] duck.com api key to generate random duck.com alias for each site in Bitwarden-->Sign up for new service using new random email+password in seconds and never have to remember it and no spam. Here is a simple crossplatform workflow: Paid proton suite[6]-->Single memorized master password[3]-->Generate random email alias and password for new services using proton pass. If you use iCloud+ you can generate email aliases using a Raycast[7] extension or a browser extension[8] or inside of safari natively. There is also iCloud+ settings, but that is a pain to get to. [1] https://proton.me/mail https://proton.me/mail [2] https://bitwarden.com/go/start-free https://bitwarden.com/go/start-free [3] https://strongphrase.net https://strongphrase.net [4] https://duckduckgo.com/email https://duckduckgo.com/email [5] https://bitwarden.com/blog/how-to-use-the-bitwarden-forwarded-email-alias-generator https://bitwarden.com/blog/how-to-use-the-bitwarden-forwarde... [6] https://proton.me/mail/pricing https://proton.me/mail/pricing [7] https://www.raycast.com/svenhofman/hidemyemail https://www.raycast.com/svenhofman/hidemyemail [8] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/icloud-hide-my-email/omiaekblhgfopjkjnenhahfgcgnbohlk https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/icloud-hide-my-emai...

PaulHoule 6mo ago

Whenever I get some breathless email about security from my organization I send a phishing report for it even if I think it is real. All the messages about mandatory password resets and the like just increase the surface area for phishing. There should be a policy like "we will never send you an email about the security of your account" See https://www.ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-research/tech-at-ftc/2016/03/time-rethink-mandatory-password-changes https://www.ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-research/tech-at-ftc/201... a policy that's been talked about for more than 10 years and that the industry is almost catching up to.

jbellis 6mo ago

I've had some close calls already and with AI making it cheap to tailor scams to individuals it's probably only a matter of time. For my parents in their 70s, even more so. No amount of reminding them to read URLs first is going to help. So my question is: what are best practices to limit the blast radius when I (or they) inevitably click the wrong link?

emptybits 6mo ago

I had two calls from "Apple Support" very very much like this in the past two weeks. Both times, their claim was that someone was trying to reset my Apple password and they were trying to protect me. Both times, they asked me to go to a BS "apple-support" website and enter a six digit number they'd read out to me, where I'd see a transcript of this very phone call so I could then have full assurance that they were legit and working for Apple. Uh huh. And both times, when I asked them to just send me a quick email from their address at Apple (any address, even a generic inbox or support address) to assure me they worked for Apple ... pause ... [click]. Yeah.

twoodfin 6mo ago

Don’t approve any password-reset prompts—those are the first part of the attack. Do not pass Go, just head directly to your Apple ID settings. Why do I need to go to Settings? I get these occasionally and ignore them; what harm is there in that? FWIW these were real bad for a while, but Apple seems to have gotten better at canning the spam. Maybe 1-2 per year?

mattlondon 6mo ago

No mention of password managers yet? One of the major benefits is the password manager can do a quick, simple, completely deterministic check on the domain before providing the password. That would have stopped this dead in its tracks without relying on the human just happening to notice. I personally use bitwarden on my chrome profile across Windows Mac Linux and android and think it's great. Highly recommended. Of course I tell this to family and friends and no one does it so I dunno...

WolfeReader 6mo ago
Same. I've managed to convince exactly one person how great password managers are; the others just let Chrome handle it. (It's always Chrome.)

KomoD 6mo ago

This was easily one of the best phishing attempts I've ever seen.

daneel_w 6mo ago

Two years ago, over the course of two or three weeks, my girlfriend got several of these password reset requests popping up on her iOS devices. She uses a dedicated anonymous e-mail address for her Apple/iCloud account, which she never used for anything else on the Internet, making the event somewhat peculiar.