Who even can be sure microsoftonline.com is legit. Microsoft's domain story is such a mess, I wouldn't be surprised if not even internally they have one complete list of all the domain assets they own.
But they are not alone. It is kind of ironic when companies insist that we check the domain to spot spam but are unable publish a list with all domains they officially use to send mail.
Tangent: I used to receive at least a dozen bank scam calls per day in India, especially during insurance renewal. I wanted the banks to publish official phone numbers and mandate their employees to use only official numbers.
Recently the regulatory bodies did just that and so the banks should only use 1600 numbers to contact their customers. My bank scam calls have dropped to 0.
In France, basically every bank say (show in their app and everything) "if we call you and ask anything like code, confirmation, to do an action, anything, end the call and call us back, don't do anything on a call you didn't initiate".
Same in their app eg you try to do a sepa wire to a new recipient and you get a warning "are you on the phone with someone ? did someone ask you to do that ? please call your bank by pressing this button. By the way we will never call you to ask an auth code or to do a wire"
A few UK banks detect that you're on a phone call and show a message like "we've never called you" or "we are not calling you right now" in their app, I think that's really smart.
Here is a fun one, my mobile phone company has an account lock along with a pin and OTP over SMS system. In order for me to activate a new device (like an phone upgrade) with eSIM over the phone, I need to unlock my account with account lock, give them the pin over the phone, and read the SMS OTP to the mobile phone rep online. I get doing the account unlock and verbal pin, but I don't get why they ask for the OTP especially when they train us to never share the OTP over the phone. I even asked the rep about it, but he mentioned that you should never share the OTP if you did not initiate the service request. From a security posture point of view I think that stinks. I am not exactly sure how they expect SMS OTP to work in the case where my phone is not functional.
And then we have the national post office sending its notifications from the scammiest-looking domain they could find: noreply@notif-colissimo-laposte.info
In Turkey, if my bank calls me, they also send a push notification telling "We are calling you. The representative's name is $NAME. You can talk safely".
Unfortunately in the US, maybe elsewhere, pharmacies and medical offices have trained the elderly it’s okay to verify their dob when they call. Costco does that when they call and it drives me nuts.
Knowing what numbers are real through an official publication is very good, but it only allows you to place trust in calls you make, not calls you receive, because making calls doesn't involve caller ID, receiving calls does, and caller ID is spoofable.
Ask them their name/ last initial, employee ID or unique identifier for the conversation, direct phone number, job title and what location they're based at. Scammers will pretty much always refuse/argue/hang up on this (once I had one start insulting my mother in Hindi when I asked him this). Then call your bank's proper number and verify all of these details.
(But in any case your bank will never call outwards to you, unless you've specifically requested that, which you almost never do.)
Unfortunately my UK banks (and others) DO regularly make calls to me unannounced and demand my ID to 'prove who I am'. They are not scam calls and the callers cannot understand what they are doing wrong. If I'd had more strength in the last round of this stupidity I'd have done a number on them with the regulator. (I used to work in finance and was the director of a regulated financial entity, so I think I'd have a head start.)
I ask them for all of that and their credit card details, mothers maiden name, name of their first pet, first school they went to, and what colour underwear they’re wearing.
I should probably learn how to insult their mother in Hindi too.
Or, which has worked great for me; just never answer the phone. If people need something they will email or chat. If not then it is not going to be important.
This. If people have a "real" reason to correspond with you they will have no problem making a record of it via a voicemail or text or email or whatever.
Nowadays, when banks call you here, they allow you to verify the bank is actually calling you with the mobile app - you can see their name and number they're calling you from in the app. Also, you can often verify you're you with the app too, same as any other app authorization, so you don't have to share any details over the phone. I feel like this is a pretty good improvement.
That does seem better than blind trust but that app infrastructure could get compromised. I would still be wary in any situation where I did not originate the call with the bank.
We have an app called bankid. If my bank calls me they'll ask me to open the app to auth, the app shows that the specific bank initiated auth and also says that they called me.
Same app is used to auth to government pages and all kinds of stuff online, even purchases.
That would take nothing to implement. Services like Truecaller already do live caller ID against databases on iOS / Android. All it would take is a sensible register of verified numbers
"Hello, I'm calling from Blockchain, I would like to talk about your investment portfolio"
it weirded me out they would pretend to be from the underlying technology instead of an exchange or something. I kept thinking I should pretend to be the CEO of TCP/IP or something when they called.
Hard to beat Outlook 2007 which had some "smart tags" feature that all referenced "5iantlavalamp.com", and things started breaking when that domain expired.
It's hard to remember many details from almost 20 years ago, I just remember coming across it in email spools while writing anti-spam analysis scripts. Only mention I can find nowadays is https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/22812691/What-is-....
I was working in anti-spam at the time, so I was eyeballing a lot of raw email dumps and writing analysis scripts for "anomalous" urls, so it popped up fairly frequently.
The primary problem is we can't search through time via WayBack Machine where a lot of these things have gone. Took me a while the other day to surface the Choco-Banana Shake Hang which Microsoft deleted from their production site.
Ah I misremembered one thing, nothing broke because it wasn’t even an existing domain when they used it. That was a different Microsoft domain I was thinking of.
What definition of the word scam are you using here? What promise of a product that you pay for that isn't being delivered, with uploading your id to a site on the Internet?
Rhetoric won't save you from the embarrassing situation you created for yourself. You accused something of being a scam without understanding the definition of the word. Now that your claim has been challenged, you're trying to redefine terms and argue around the issue rather than admit you were wrong.
> Who even can be sure microsoftonline.com is legit.
Yeah. I queried the 1st thing that came to mind and internalmicrosoft.com and microsoftinternal.com are available. With that much potential out there, I'd want to keep my official domain group tight.
Not only that, but they wrap the links in their email with click tracking provided by domains that have nothing to do with them (Mailgun or whatever). So even if you try to introspect the links you're clicking, they seem to go to a scammy domain even if they're legit!
This was a common issue when I consulted with bankruptcy lawyers and had to figure out what domain assets the company had. Commonly the representatives only knew about some of the domains and we found at least a few more.
Same with third party services, sometimes they used one for something for a while and collected customer or user data there and then stopped but kept paying for it, and forgot they had it. We typically found these through analysis of their accounting.
Having a service crap out because someone didn’t pay for the domain is almost a trope. It never occurred to me that the reverse might happen - paying for unused domains.
Not only have you stopped using it, but did any of your customers ever allow list it in the past? Great way to attack customers of some large businesses if you ever see it happen.
Remember those indian microsoft support centers and that strange correlation of you being called by a indian microsoft scammer the next day after you called there. Not implying causation.. just..
For a company with as much weight in the industry as Microsoft, it would be trivial to ensure their domains don’t end up on spam lists. Heck, because of outlook.com, they control have the spam lists themselves.
The real reason for multiple domains is likely more stupid than that. It’s likely because different teams want to move faster than the whole of Microsoft, so register a domain for their MVP to enable them to prototype like a start up. Because going through the usual hoops with enterprise regarding using their established domains will be a long and torturous process. And before long, their new prototype domain becomes so integrated into their product that adopting it as official is just easier than switching to microsoft.com.
I couldn’t say for sure that’s what has happened here. But it’s the story I’ve seen with domain ownership in other enterprises
Microsoft.com is also owned by the marketing org, not the engineering org, for various reasons that predate the existence of many employees at Microsoft now.
This is why with rare, rare exceptions nothing "real" is on Microsoft.com including even the login page, with one exception (the passkey domain).
Okay, so then they should stop doing stuff like trying to push people to log into Windows with Microsoft accounts instead of offline credentials and then using that as an excuse to send out inane marketing emails that no one wants. "We're doing something shitty as a workaround for the consequences of other shitty things we do" isn't a particularly good reason for not acting so shitty.
...and microsoftonline.com is not among them (unlike microsoftonline.net and other variants). But it seems to have been registered in 2002, and the record looks legit:
Such a list will never exist in an organisation of this size, with the amount of delegated management and operations required for these functions. In fact, it’s unlikely such a list is even _allowed_ to exist given the sensitive nature of some areas of the business, being a publicly traded company which works directly with regulated entities and governments.
It’d be interesting to hear a senior old-timer from MS to weigh in on their blog about this, and similar/adjacent problems that arise from working across such a colossal entity.
It’s a wonder they ever release anything new, if I’m being completely honest. The amount of governance, hoops, process and procedure across every aspect of their business must be staggering.
> In fact, it’s unlikely such a list is even _allowed_ to exist given the sensitive nature of some areas of the business, being a publicly traded company which works directly with regulated entities and governments.
If the existence of a domain/subdomain is considered sensitive information, then something has gone very wrong.
Companies do register domains before launching products and don't want to leak them. Now, I still support Microsoft and other companies to list the domains they send official emails from.
Why would that not be possible?
You can still do that and then once the rabbit is out add it to the main list.
Come on, don't let the good be the enemy of the perfect.
I'm sure there are several ways to find and list all domains.
What bothers me more is that they allowed to have different domains in the first place. Why not sub domains to make it clear.
That's what I said? Companies can hide domains while they are under development but then they should still maintain a list that they send emails from. I was opposed to legislation that required all registered domains regardless of use being published.
I got used to that one, but the other day I was checking Outlook in the web browser and I ended up on outlook.cloud.microsoft, I couldn't believe my eyes.
I'm either impressed by whatever spam filter you having literally zero false positives or negatives, or I'm confused about what you think it means to "be sure".
I have plenty of false negatives, mostly due to companies in know I get a mail from using spamlike html mails, I always verify on the phone it is the mail they send to be sure but it happens way too often.
On a semi-related note, Microsoft security is genuinely terrible.
For the past week, my Microsoft authenticator has been pinging about sign-ins from random places. Except the login history page is completely empty. Not even my own sign ins show up.
Now, you would be forgiven for thinking it's because my password leaked, but no. The default sign in flow with the app enabled is email + authenticator. No password required. In their eternal wisdom this option is not changeable in the app.
Microsoft really should realize that the only reason the account still exists is because they bought Minecraft and stop complicating my life.
Microsoft also has this cool thing where if someone fails to get into your account too many times, your account can get locked and you are asked to reset your password. For a working password.
Even after changing my password, I couldn't login to my email on my phone, so I just gave up. I only use that email for a handful of things anyway.
Their enterprise account system (active directory or whatever it's called) also has an awesome bug where if you accidentally reload the page during password reset, the link will no longer be valid, but your old password will already be invalidated. So you won't be able to log in at all untill IT staff manually changes your password.
I've been getting this too, authenticator prompts saying "logged in" and asking for confirmation, but no history whatsoever when I went to security to check.
It freaked me out the first time, I went through all the security settings I could find, but it was if it never happened.
I just ignored it the second time, but it's a bit unsettling, because the default authenticator flow also has the chance of accidentally hitting the right number.
You have to create a new @outlook email to use as a username only you know, and then remove your actual email as a sign-in option. Only way to mitigate the MFA spam currently.
I also had this starting a few months back. I changed the email address (really, just an alias to the same mailbox as before) and the notifications stopped.
It is doing something different than RFC 6238, which theoretically is more secure. The way they have it implemented is worse than if they did nothing though. If they cared at all about security they would have pulled it down years ago when this vector being abused was first being reported by users. But nope admitting a mistake isn't in the vocabulary of. The leaders definitely know what they're doing.
Agreed; and more generally, Microsoft's online services in general are terrible. Their login system is a mess, their UX is awful... our company is a microsoft partner but there's like 27 different ways to be one, with a bunch of different accounts, forms and systems for it. Azure UX is atrocious. And this nonsense spills into every single enterprise product they offer too (how many people complain about Teams?).
Here in Belgium, 80% of enterprise accounts use MS over Google and I genuinely don't get why. (Without getting into the fiasco of not really having an EU alternative to either of those)
> Here in Belgium, 80% of enterprise accounts use MS over Google and I genuinely don't get why. (Without getting into the fiasco of not really having an EU alternative to either of those)
Maybe because those enterprises already used on-prem AD? It's much "easier" to have a hybrid monstrosity combining on-prem AD and Azure AD than on-prem AD and Google (or anything non-MS, really). Plus, MS is already a supplier, so for large, bureaucratic entities, they already have a foot in the door.
They now support passkeys with things other than their shitty app. I use 1Password, and it works fine.
I've also had a yubikey for a long time and can't be bothered to type in codes, so I didn't know their shitty app did OTP or even that OTP was actually a possibility for MS accounts.
A while back I had a reservation with a hotel on Booking and I received a phish attempt that came directly via the Booking site domain email and also DMs but "sent" by the hotel. When I looked into it at the time, it seemed less like an issue of hotels specifically having their accounts infiltrated and more like some kind of message/email endpoint on Booking's end was being abused in a similar manner.
I'm not sure this is the same type of issue but found this interesting, especially since apparently it's been reported to MS and no action has been taken.
I have not seen one of these that wasn't a compromised hotel email or booking account. I have had to "help" a hotel get malware/RATs off their system more than a dozen times as a _guest_
I've started to assume that any non-chain hotel is compromised after losing $2k to hackers that completely owned the hotel's email system. Thankfully DMARC made it irrefutable that it was their system at fault and they assumed liability. BEC is shockingly common and difficult to detect until it's too late.
Not just BEC, at multiple non-chains I have found keyloggers, card stealers and everything in between. I refuse to use anything but apple pay on an actual payment terminal (or a 3P booker that passes on a virtual card) and no ID scans or copies.
TBH I can't imagine the trust of letting a guest access their booking computer handling cards and given the admin password for UAC particularly helped their case here ;-;
My employer's domain starts with "m". Bunch of people recently fell victim for a fishing email whose domain started with "rn". In Outlook 's font the two look almost identical.
I feel sad that what I think of as the obvious solution, companies using subdomains like internal.microsoft.com instead of making a million different domains, is so far from happening that no one here on HN has even brought it up.
I'm receiving daily about 20 to 30 spam mails from google servers. I'm sorting them into a separate SPAM folder for the "fun" of it.
Who to contact? How to make Google stop? Where to report the abuse of their services? I can't find out. The whole service is basically a big <bleep> off and "we don't want any contact."
Maybe I also need to publish some article, so it can be published here on HN? Maybe that could give it some traction for someone at Google to look into it?
Yeah, I fell into that rabbit hole once. Tried all abuse channels that I could find. network-abuse@ refers you to the Google Cloud abuse form. They ‘are not able to take action on this report since the IP mentioned in the report is not hosted on Google Cloud.’ Gmail abuse doesn’t even bother to reply (why should they, it’s not about Gmail after all). In the end, I just blocked DKIM identifiers related to Firebase via Rspamd.
It's not gmail accounts, but "services" (?) hosted on Google's cloud. Basically I see X.X.X.X.bc.googleusercontent.com addresses in the "Received" header fields, e.g. "22.185.141.34.bc.googleusercontent.com"
When doing a WHOIS on that IP we'll get a contact address for abuse reports: "google-cloud-compliance@google.com", but sending anything there, returns an error that the user doesn't exists.
Meta had(has?) a similar bug with one of their business manager features, the attacker has complete control of the initial body text which makes it highly convincing.
Trying to report this was an exercise in futility, I guess they get so much beg bounty spam that their security submission process filters out the occasional legitimate issue.
I've been receiving these for so long I started thinking it must be just me being targeted and not widespread, as Meta seems to not do anything about it.
Emails comming legitimeley from noreply@business.facebook.com with the text below. Go and decypher which part is Meta template and which is creative use of user supplied text...
Your Meta's Page may be at risk due to unusual
activity is not part of or affiliated with
Meta. Only approve requests and invitations from
people and businesses that you know and trust.
Meta will never ask for passwords, payment
information or personal details in an email. You've
received a partner request. Partners are other
businesses that you work with on Facebook. Partner
sharing lets you give access to your business assets,
but not to your business portfolio. This request is
from:
Your Page is under restriction review Contact Meta
Support: metafanpageviolate@gmail.com Protect yourself
from fraud: Verify the identity of the requester by
contacting the business using official contact information.
The ones I've seen from PayPal are basically from sending a large request for money to you, then in the freeform text field for the reason, putting fake "if you believe this is a scam, call [actually a scam number]" text.
I can confirm. Interestingly they actually put a random USDC transaction number from Coinbase which was very close (close enough that I thought it was accurate) of a transaction I actually did on Coinbase at one point. I was so confused so I ended up calling the number but immediately realized once they picked up what was going on. Essentially they got really lucky that my actual transaction amount was close enough to seem plausible.
This is a failure on PayPal’s email template that the freeform text field appears just as legit as other items. The text label was something like “Message from Sender”.
> This is a failure on PayPal’s email template that the freeform text field appears just as legit as other items.
This is a somewhat common pattern in scams - abusing freeform text fields in emails or other messages to give the impression that a message is coming from a source that didn't intend to send it.
Another variant I've seen is malicious URLs linking to search engines which display the user's search terms, e.g. a link to a Microsoft site search with a prefilled search of "YOU HAVE A VIRUS, CALL MICROSOFT SUPPORT 555-1212".
The minimum withdrawal is 10 usd or 20 usd, depending on where you'll be withrdrawing it to. You have less than that in your account and won't be using Paypal soon? say goodbye to those 7 dollars.
-- Oh, but you can wait, maybe later you'll use those 7 dollars
No, if you don't do transactions for 1 year, they charge you a $10 inactivity fee.
It’s designed to hold your money hostage and then take it afterward
The only reason to use Paypal is that you have no other way of paying for something. Even cryptocurrency is more user-friendly than Paypal.
I own a domain and have a catch all email. I routinely get emails from Microsoft and Google's official email addresses telling me that some account will be closed, or some other account notifications. I never created these accounts, and when I try to log into them or do a password reset, it does not go anywhere. It's been a minor mystery why I keep getting these emails for a while.
The Microsoft emails are coming from microsoft-noreply@microsoft.com so it's a bit different than in this article.
I've been receiving loads of spam from google MX servers lately until blocking all mails with X-Google-Group-Id headers. I don't know how it's possible, the contents were 100% spammer controlled, no Google template
big vendors asking users to inspect domains while spreading mail across unclear domains is part of the problem. publishing a signed, boring source of truth for official sending domains would help defenders a lot.
Typically it's a mis-placed feature. Something like "send an email alert when a thing happens" and they let you control what goes in the message body as well as who the message should be sent towards. Sounds reasonable on the surface, but without guardrails it lets folks send arbitrary emails from your domain.
I got one of those random 2auth codes email and I assumed my password had been compromised. At least it's some kind of relief to know that it's only a compromised Microsoft email address...
But they are not alone. It is kind of ironic when companies insist that we check the domain to spot spam but are unable publish a list with all domains they officially use to send mail.