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by mikeash 3446 days ago
Apple's 2FA for iCloud will likely avoid this if you're careful. They do a GeoIP lookup of where the request is coming from and show the approximate location of the login attempt before they show you the 2FA code. For example, when logging in legitimately from home, it'll say that there's a login attempt from the city where I live. In the likely case where the phisher's server isn't in this area, it'll show something else, and I'll know what's up.

Obviously this isn't perfect because it depends on people actually paying attention to that, and on not having too many false positives due to GeoIP failures, but it seems like a nice improvement.

Apple has a nice UI on it (no surprise, I'm sure) where they show a map centered on the location in question, but even SMS-based solutions could include a quick "Login attempt from City" along with the code.

1 comments

Apple's 2FA is good, but their geo-location needs some work. I constantly get notifications that someone located 3000km away from me is trying to log in whenever I perform a 2FA sign on.

It's enough to concern me on the odd occasion that someone is trying a MITM attack.

I am guessing it is because in Australia, quite often the central server allocating IP addresses for our major ISPs can be in a completely different city?!?

That's too bad. Do other services get it right?