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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

The biggest scare I've gotten is somehow ending up on "colnbase.com" (instead of "coinbase.com").

It's defunct now, but at the time it was a 1:1 replica of Coinbase. And the only reason I noticed was because 1Password didn't offer to fill in my credentials.

While knowing someone's email/password combo might not be enough for an attacker to do anything malicious on Coinbase itself (due to email re-verification maybe), the point is that even the smartest of us Hacker News users can fall for it. And that should scare the rest of us.

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So so true. 1Password refusing to auto fill a password has saved me multiple times in the past! Also, one of my friends has a PhD in literally rocket science (aeronautical engineering from MIT) and got scammed by someone who stole his brother's SIM card and did some shenanigans. No one is safe, no matter how smart or tech savvy you think you are! For the less tech savvy folks, I understand why they are scared, it's hard to give them even general tips to not lose the farm to fraudsters.

The general advice I give is:

Don't trust incoming calls, text messages or emails.

Don't trust caller ID on your phone.

If someone calls you asking for information or to do something, ask for a case id or reference number. Hang up, call back on a number you get from a previous bill, back of your credit card, or by googling the company.

If anyone is pushing for something to be done urgently, stop. Hang up, don't take any action. Call a trusted other person and talk to them about it.

>by googling the company

And remember it's going to be the 4th or 5th link down, not the first.

Yeah the first will be the scammers with a highly targeted ad buy, and who can even tell the difference between ads and search results these days?

All of my search results are search results, because of ad blockers.

Now, many of my search results suck due to SEO and whatnot, but that’s a different story.

This is one of many reasons why ad blocking isn't just cosmetic: it's a best practice for security too!

So much this.

I recently saved a friend from getting scammed when she wanted to buy an audiobook, we wanted to avoid Audible because of the DRM and limited device selection.

The first few results she got were some shady services offering really good deals. I looked them up on trustpilot and they weren't outright scams, but they aggressively pushed you into getting an expensive monthly subscription that was basically impossible to cancel.

I really wish phones would change the UI to make it more obvious that caller ID shouldn't be trusted.

> Don't trust incoming calls, text messages or emails.

> Don't trust caller ID on your phone.

And if you're anyone of moderate fame, importance or cryptocurrency holdings, call back using a phone other than the one you received the call from. SS7 attacks remain relatively cheap , and redirecting an outgoing phone call placed to a phone number they know you're likely to call next is within the realm of feasible attacks.

> If anyone is pushing for something to be done urgently, stop. Hang up, don't take any action. Call a trusted other person and talk to them about it.

This is honestly the #1 piece of advice to give friends and family.

Almost every scam is predicated on urgency.

I have an entirely seperate phone and SIM for any service I think is important which demands a phone number. (prepay, I top it up by €5 every few months. Sadly I can't automate that)

I generally refuse to give any number if I can help it. I can count on one hand the number of unsolicited calls/texts I've gotten.

I know that "rocket scientist" has been a standin for "smart person" or "genius", but in this case, I would be more surprised if a computer security expert (various job titles) had been scammed, because it's their job to be up on this stuff.

How often does a rocket scientist deal with computer viruses, or phishing emails, etc compared to a security expert? Most of the time, their IT security expert (ideally) stops it before it gets to them..

I may be more qualified then, I work in fraud. I accidentally called a fake airline number to get a refund for a Delta ticket and happily gave the guy my credit card for some such fee. If requiring a credit card fee to get a refund isn't a red flag, I don't know a better one. To be fair, my sister had found the number and three way joined me in because I was helping her buy the ticket. So an extra rule: don't even trust a phone number someone you know found because /they/ might have been the first victim and passing compromised information to you.

Rocket science is surprisingly straightforward, it's rocket engineering that's the tricky one.

Yeah projectile motion is high school physics.

Engineering the thing to not rip itself apart, melt, or explode is the hard part.

Physical SIM cards should _always_ have a strong PIN set. It baffles me how many people either don't have a PIN or it's just set to 0000. You're basically handing over your whole digital life away to anyone who gets their hand on your SIM card.

I didn’t even know that existed until now.

Smart people often have blind spots. The confidence you get from knowing one subject really well can leave you vulnerable in other areas.

This is one of the reasons scammers like to target doctors.

> Also, one of my friends has a PhD in literally rocket science (aeronautical engineering from MIT)

One of my friends is a nuclear physicist from TU Delft and they somehow managed to install a fake clone of Chrome haha. Somehow never got their accounts broken into or money stolen.

I nearly lost an account because I assumed that 1Password was just being dumb not offering to auto-fill credentials. Turns out I'm the dumb one for doubting it.

Now if 1Password shows nothing to auto-fill I make damn sure I'm on the right site.

> the only reason I noticed was because 1Password didn't offer to fill in my credentials.

Nice, I always hope this will save me but I never landed on such a phishing site. How did it happen for you?

About domain-based autofills, perhaps less so now than 5-10 years ago: it always seemed weird that the whole security industry seemed to say these plugins, or the browser's built-in password store, are dangerous because there were past vulnerabilities and any website you visit can exploit it. The way I see it: vulns get fixed, I just need to not be in the 1st wave of persons they target (risk type: plane crash, very small odds but sucks to be you); receiving phishing emails or messages happens constantly and apparently it works well enough to continue doing it and evading filters constantly (risk type: car crash, can happen and they get only the creds for the website being autofilled). Would recommend to anyone who then realises something is up when the autofill doesn't work, but ideally would have more evidence to back that up

I don't remember how I ended up there but I'm sure it was a fake email.

Just copy one of Coinbase's legit emails for something like "A withdrawal of $1,200 USD has been started" and you have the perfect bait.

> that even the smartest of us Hacker News users

Well, ok then.

> 1Password didn't offer to fill in my credentials. > the point is that even the smartest of us Hacker News users can fall for it.

But you didn't fall for it, a simple password manager technique worked as advertised?

One of the worst parts of using a oassword manager is that apps and websites don’t by default share their credentials. I could totally see me getting caught by a shady link to a website of an app that I use but because I’ve never logged into the website, 1Password makes me search for it.

My friend was not smart as you, and religiously typed password on a fake Amazon website link clicked from an SMS promising a refund on recent purchase. Stopped only when it asked for 2FA code because there was no 2FA setup.

https://www.merklemap.com/search?query=coinbase.com&page=0&t...

There’s indeed a lot of them :)

mvspace.com was a really good phishing site back in the day when MySpace was an actual thing.

> The biggest scare I've gotten is somehow ending up on "colnbase.com" (instead of "coinbase.com").

You might want to install some browser extensions to block content. Then block all content (set to whitelist) and selectively add the sites you know.

If you end up on a new site with some amalgamation of letters that look familiar, the extension will rightfully block it and prompt you whether you want to whitelist or not. Big ole' red flag right there.

Of course it's not foolproof. It is just another layer in the strategy of defense-in-depth.

This is such a waste of time to do this for every single site! Especially when it's easier to rely on the password manager in cases like this

What I do is a greater waste of time -- I have a separate browser profile for each individual site that I might log into, and javascript is only whitelisted for that one site in that profile. It's a real pain because whenever my browser adds a new config option, I have to update the settings in each of the ~20 profiles.

It has saved me a few times where some rogue javascript tries to redirect me to some unexpected site, and the destination site simply doesn't load.

I think there's a Firefox extension for this usecase.

Combining that with Multi-account container should make it easier to manage ?

dude what how do you have so much free time my lazy ass just has ublock origin with some lists enabled that my even more techbro help me set up and it automatically stops me from visiting suspicious websites this feels like way too much work

And Firefox is such a pain to automate

I just want every new machine to have my extension settings, but then it's four hours later and I'm trying to check if some policy file was obsoleted in version 60

Such a time sink

Sounds like uMatrix (RIP) with extra steps.

> This is such a waste of time to do this for every single site!

That's your opinion. But it works for me and doesn't take much time at all to wield.

> Especially when it's easier to rely on the password manager in cases like this

Passwords aren't the only thing this helps guard. Password manager won't prevent the site from loading in the first place. So if that site delivers malware then your password manager won't help you.

That's your opinion that it works for you, but more importantly, that it would work for others instead of teaching them to automatically click "yes" after clicking a link to a site they want to visit after having to do this hundreds of times for all those hundreds of sites they had to visit before, so a supposedly big red flag could be nothing more than one of those brown cookie gdpr annoyances

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