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Gone (Almost) Phishin'

ma.tt

91–93 of 93 posts

Re: Gone (Almost) Phishin'

#91
post #71
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>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=8c11bcc71f68…

> 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: https://wa.gov-phish.fit/dol https://seattle.gov-phish.cc/dmv (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…

I think you have it the other way, the hyphen should be in a place where it can be confused with a period. E.g. foo-example.com, which at first glance mentally parses similarly to foo.example.com

This is how the scam page in OPs article is formatted, and I think it could easily fool a technical person who's tired. Precisely for the reason you touched on that when you're used to working with reverse DNS notation your eye is drawn to the last period. But hyphen and period are both used as "separators" in different contexts, so you have to be vigilant enough to override the natural instinct to chunk based on any separator.

Re: Gone (Almost) Phishin'

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

if we run out of 2 letter TLDs, move to 3 letter ones. it really wouldn't be that hard. Also, that's assuming our current system stays in place

The country code TLDs are ISO country codes. Nothing technically requires that to continue, but if ISO re-uses a country code & ICANN doesn't, it'll get somewhat confusing.

Re: Gone (Almost) Phishin'

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if we run out of 2 letter TLDs, move to 3 letter ones. it really wouldn't be that hard. Also, that's assuming our current system stays in place

The country code TLDs are ISO country codes. Nothing technically requires that to continue, but if ISO re-uses a country code & ICANN doesn't, it'll get somewhat confusing.

If anyone would avoid reusing codes, it's the ISO. They love legacy compliance and compatibility (which is why I have tremendous respect for them when I'm designing software since they've certainly thought about something more than I have)
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