If the following message lands in your mailbox, you may wish to throw on your “This is highly suspicious” cap before proceeding further:

fake apple phish mail

 

The email is titled

RE: [ Summary Report ] Statement login and update account 08/05/2017

Note the old spammer trick of placing “RE:” at the start to make you think there’s some sort of correspondence taking place.

Spoiler: there isn’t.

The message reads as follows:

Apple ID
Account Information Page

We need your help resolving an issue with your account. Thus, we have temporarily lock your account.

We understant it may be frustating not to have full access to your account.

We want to work with you to get your account back to normal as quickly as possible.

How can you help?

It’s usually quite straight forward to take care of these things. Most of time, we just need some more information about your account.

Please complete your account informations by clicking in the link below.

Confirm My Account
We will permanently lock your account if we don’t receive your verification within 24 hours.

Regards,

Apple Support

The URL used is a Goo(dot)gl shortener (now deactivated), which was bouncing users to the final destination below located at

online-appleidsupport-accountimportant(dot)net/Login(dot)php?

apple account phish

Entering an Apple ID and password results in the following (fake) message that the account has been locked:

We’ve noticed significant changes in your account activity. For your protection, we’ve disable [SIC] your account.

Unlock account

The next page asks for a lot of personal information, including: name, address, DOB, phone number, full card information, security question information, and even 3D secure details.

fake verification 1

fake verification request 2

This is not something you want to hand your details over to. This site joins the ranks of phishing pages making use of HTTPs to appear more authentic – here’s the real Apple sign in page:

the real apple page

You’ll notice it mentions the company name. This is called an Extended Validation certificate. The one being used on the phish page claims to be from a service offering free certs to those possessing a web domain.

not apple

A good example of why you shouldn’t just believe the site in front of you is legit, purely because there’s HTTPs going on in the background. Emails directing you to pages asking for payment info via embedded links should set off all the warning alarms – and this particular email and website combo should be forever banished to your “ignore forever” folder.

Christopher Boyd