>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.
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"
Microsoft is really bad with this. Login might be live.com or microsoftonline.com or maybe onmicrosoft.com. I went to report a vulnerability to their security portal this week and it redirected me to b2clogin.com.
OneDrive email attachments link to, I kid you not, 1drv.ms, or maybe it was 1drv.com…
Not to mention, they use .ms as if it’s their personal TLD, but obviously anyone can register a .ms domain. It’s like they want people to get phished.
Handy tip: all two-letter TLDs are country code TLDs. Doesn't matter if they're trendy in website names (.nu, .cc, .io, .co, .it, .at, .cx, youtu.be and so on)
In fact, here we have the ma.tt website, where the ".tt" is Trinidad and Tobago. Is Matt Mullenweg from Trinidad? No!
It's kind of crazy that the IRS (among other United States government agencies) uses ID.me for account management. The .me domain belongs to Montenegro.
I think ID.me is a private company. So yeah, it’s especially fucking stupid that they use that in the first place. Any gov login should be required to go through a .gov tld. At least reverse proxy it or something!
the .su domain was made when the soviet union was still around, so that doesn't really break the rules. I would prefer for top level domains to be eternal for a great multitude of reasons
The possible annoyance with eternal country-code TLDs would be the dissolution of one country, and the creation (or renaming) of another country resulting in an eventual exhaustion of two-letter country codes. Eternity is a rather long duration.
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.
> senior citizens and tried to explain how to parse the domain
Why would you want end users, senior citizens or not, to mentally parse URLs?
The rule is: If the bank, or paypal, or your landlord, or anyone else really emails you that you have to complete some information to your account or pay the latest bill or whatever, you GO TO THEIR WEBSITE and login normally. If it is important they will have the same information there.
The same rule also applied to unsolicited phonecalls, but it might be harder to follow: If your bank, or the police, or some other important person calls you and asks for information or for you to do something that feels the least bit off or hurried, you take their contact information, you look up whatever it is they want you to do and you CALL THEM BACK at the official telephone number of the bank or the police. You probably already have the number and if you don't it's on their web site. Do not call back on any other number.
People working the phone generally have much worse protocols than people working over email, so they may be less prepared for you to do this, but I have never heard of anything important that was emailed that wasn't also easily available when logged in to the website.
The only time it is appropriate to click a link in an email is when you are verifying your email address with them. Not for any other reason.
> 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.
Have you tried some analogy which will be personal to them? Like describing the URL as a family tree: “com is the oldest ancestor, like you Mr Johnson. Then apple is your son Bill, and getsupport is your grandchild Cody. If you saw ml instead of getsupport, that would be a different grandchild, but still in your family. However, when you see phish and xyz before apple and com you can think ‘I don’t know those people, they aren’t my father and grandfather’”.
The idea is imperfect but I literally just thought of it. We could certainly come up with something better that might eventually work.
Thank you for working to keep vulnerable people safe from phishing.
(Real examples, with "phish" replacing a string of 3-4 random letters)
In some ways, it's a more convincing fake URL, since even if you're used to reading the domain right-to-left, your brain wants to start from the hyphen since it's a different character following a familiar TLD. But that type of domain also seems a lot easier for spam detection rules to catch.
> 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.
Might try explaining it this way?
It works the same way as a postal address. The first part before / is the envelope: by analogy it runs streetaddress.city.country.
You can give a name to your house, or add an apartment to the front - but that doesn't change the most significant part.
> 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.:
Yep, and there's even things like irs.gov which tells you how to know a site is official (https, and .gov), and then links you to id.me to login. (not sure what was wrong with login.gov, which SSA lets you use)
1Password has really been bugging me recently, all the emails they send have giant link buttons they want you to click without verifying where you're actually going
I recall receiving an email from company X, warning me to not trust emails that said they were from X but didn't come from X.com. But the warning email itself did not come from X.com! They broke their own rules in the warning email.
It's been a while, so I cannot name and shame X...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
91 comments
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.
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"
OneDrive email attachments link to, I kid you not, 1drv.ms, or maybe it was 1drv.com…
Not to mention, they use .ms as if it’s their personal TLD, but obviously anyone can register a .ms domain. It’s like they want people to get phished.
In fact, here we have the ma.tt website, where the ".tt" is Trinidad and Tobago. Is Matt Mullenweg from Trinidad? No!
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.
> senior citizens and tried to explain how to parse the domain
Why would you want end users, senior citizens or not, to mentally parse URLs?
The rule is: If the bank, or paypal, or your landlord, or anyone else really emails you that you have to complete some information to your account or pay the latest bill or whatever, you GO TO THEIR WEBSITE and login normally. If it is important they will have the same information there.
The same rule also applied to unsolicited phonecalls, but it might be harder to follow: If your bank, or the police, or some other important person calls you and asks for information or for you to do something that feels the least bit off or hurried, you take their contact information, you look up whatever it is they want you to do and you CALL THEM BACK at the official telephone number of the bank or the police. You probably already have the number and if you don't it's on their web site. Do not call back on any other number.
People working the phone generally have much worse protocols than people working over email, so they may be less prepared for you to do this, but I have never heard of anything important that was emailed that wasn't also easily available when logged in to the website.
The only time it is appropriate to click a link in an email is when you are verifying your email address with them. Not for any other reason.
https://bsky.app/profile/safety.bsky.app/post/3ljp6zi7tp227
> 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.
Have you tried some analogy which will be personal to them? Like describing the URL as a family tree: “com is the oldest ancestor, like you Mr Johnson. Then apple is your son Bill, and getsupport is your grandchild Cody. If you saw ml instead of getsupport, that would be a different grandchild, but still in your family. However, when you see phish and xyz before apple and com you can think ‘I don’t know those people, they aren’t my father and grandfather’”.
The idea is imperfect but I literally just thought of it. We could certainly come up with something better that might eventually work.
Thank you for working to keep vulnerable people safe from phishing.
> getsupport.apple.com.phish.xyz
I notice that a lot of scam texts use domains that start with a TLD followed by a hyphen, like:
(Real examples, with "phish" replacing a string of 3-4 random letters)In some ways, it's a more convincing fake URL, since even if you're used to reading the domain right-to-left, your brain wants to start from the hyphen since it's a different character following a familiar TLD. But that type of domain also seems a lot easier for spam detection rules to catch.
Privacy issues aside, white-labeling the service and infrastructure behind *.irs.gov should be a mandatory requirement.
> 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.
Might try explaining it this way?
It works the same way as a postal address. The first part before
/is the envelope: by analogy it runs streetaddress.city.country.You can give a name to your house, or add an apartment to the front - but that doesn't change the most significant part.
> 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.:
Yep, and there's even things like irs.gov which tells you how to know a site is official (https, and .gov), and then links you to id.me to login. (not sure what was wrong with login.gov, which SSA lets you use)
It's been a while, so I cannot name and shame X...
>
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...
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.
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).
Sure, I may be missing out on some opportunities. But the peace of mind is far greater.
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
[2] https://bitwarden.com/go/start-free
[3] https://strongphrase.net
[4] https://duckduckgo.com/email
[5] https://bitwarden.com/blog/how-to-use-the-bitwarden-forwarde...
[6] https://proton.me/mail/pricing
[7] https://www.raycast.com/svenhofman/hidemyemail
[8] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/icloud-hide-my-emai...
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.
Seems easily digestible and approachable for a specific target audience.
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...
"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.
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?
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?
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?
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.
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.