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Comment by mattkrea | Hacker News Reader

show-iphone-location.com is one of the most obvious phishing URLs I've ever seen.

In New Zealand when you pay for something using a Visa card, you get redirected to a "Verified by Visa" page which the domain is "securesuite.co.uk".

That always looks incredibly dodgy to me, not sure why they don't use a visa.com subdomain so it doesn't look like a phishing scam.

Yeah, it does look dodgy.

Bear in mind that it's also used for Mastercard's SecureCode and possibly other credit card providers as well.

Thank you! I've never signed up for it because of this.

I've seen that in the United States on a completely different domain. I actually changed banks over it when Wells Fargo set it up.

To answer your root cause question: I think it's a hook back to the issuing bank, and Visa themselves are only tangentially involved, AIUI. So things like securesuite are the vendors for the bank. (Am I wrong? That's how it was explained to me once.)

These pages are authorization page of an Access Control Server (ACS) in the 3-D Secure flow. Visa/MasterCard designed the scheme, but the spec is open (in a somewhat limited sense), so anyone can implement the ACS as long as you're qualified to see the spec and can get it certified. Banks are free to choose the ACS vendor as long as it's certified. Many banks do provide ACS authorization page at their own domain name, although a many of them just use a third party service just like in your case.

In Serbia it does that too, often with dosgy bank branding and incredibly long and convoluted base64-encoded urls... Weird.

Yes, but if you are desperate to get your phone back, the rush of excitement when finally seeing the message could very well make you gloss over this.

It is all cognitive dissonance though, if you lost EVERYTHING (your phone) then any glimmer of hope would be pretty good and you would be typing that password in without checking - speed would matter more in this situation. Also, how literate are most mobile phone users? If your English is txt spk IN BLOCK SHOUTO CAPS then you are not really going to be reading URLs.

Excellent bit of social engineering by the scammers, shame they cause so much harm.

Unfortunately there a so many users that have no idea how the internet works. It's not unusual for me to have to explain to someone, what a URL is. I had a 20 something year old friend ask me "so /where/ is the Internet?" not that long ago.

My girl believes the "cloud" is a physical structure in California. That's why the Bay Area is popular for software development.

Not even joking.

To be fair, the fog clouds coming over the hills in the Bay Area can be thick enough to look like physical structures.

Well, she's technically correct. The "cloud" is just a fancy word for someone else's computer. Be it in California or the middle of nowhere in Utah.

Hmm, I've always considered it to be a logical structure dissociated from physical machines. The prior systems were such that one stored data on a particular rack of computers but using a cloud removed that association from the customer. Yes, the data is ultimately in some computer's storage somewhere but the company can remove that computer from the internet and move the data, it's not a computer - there's an abstraction layer in place.

So, I'd say a server is "just a computer somewhere", The Cloud is necessarily more than that.

I recently talked to an older fellow who thought that it is called "the cloud" because it is located in satellites.

I deal with end users and customers and there are definitely a very high % of people who can afford an iPhone and would have no clue that that would be an illegitimate website.

Congratulations, you are an IT expert. Not everyone is.

The base of lost cell phone users has a very very long tail.

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