Privacy issues aside, white-labeling the service and infrastructure behind *.irs.gov should be a mandatory requirement.

https://bsky.app/profile/safety.bsky.app/post/3ljp6zi7tp227

Might try explaining it this way?

It works the same way as a postal address. The first part before `/` is the envelope: by analogy it runs streetaddress.city.country.

You can give a name to your house, or add an apartment to the front - but that doesn't change the most significant part.

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

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 it's a different character following a familiar TLD. But that type of domain also seems a lot easier for spam detection rules to catch.

The first time I got those I couldn't believe these were legitimate. Thank you Microsoft for teaching your customers how to fall for scams!

Another fun one is facebook, they use facebookmail.com or whatever else for serious security stuff

OneDrive email attachments link to, I kid you not, 1drv.ms, or maybe it was 1drv.com…

Not to mention, they use .ms as if it’s their personal TLD, but obviously anyone can register a .ms domain. It’s like they want people to get phished.

Why would you want end users, senior citizens or not, to mentally parse URLs?

The rule is: If the bank, or paypal, or your landlord, or anyone else really emails you that you have to complete some information to your account or pay the latest bill or whatever, you GO TO THEIR WEBSITE and login normally. If it is important they will have the same information there.

The same rule also applied to unsolicited phonecalls, but it might be harder to follow: If your bank, or the police, or some other important person calls you and asks for information or for you to do something that feels the least bit off or hurried, you take their contact information, you look up whatever it is they want you to do and you CALL THEM BACK at the official telephone number of the bank or the police. You probably already have the number and if you don't it's on their web site. Do not call back on any other number.

People working the phone generally have much worse protocols than people working over email, so they may be less prepared for you to do this, but I have never heard of anything important that was emailed that wasn't also easily available when logged in to the website.

The only time it is appropriate to click a link in an email is when you are verifying your email address with them. Not for any other reason.

Have you tried some analogy which will be personal to them? Like describing the URL as a family tree: “com is the oldest ancestor, like you Mr Johnson. Then apple is your son Bill, and getsupport is your grandchild Cody. If you saw ml instead of getsupport, that would be a different grandchild, but still in your family. However, when you see phish and xyz before apple and com you can think ‘I don’t know those people, they aren’t my father and grandfather’”.

The idea is imperfect but I literally just thought of it. We could certainly come up with something better that might eventually work.

Thank you for working to keep vulnerable people safe from phishing.

We can teach people as much as we want about security against phishing. It won't matter because people have to break these rules constantly. Companies actively train people to fall for phishing by doing everything in their power to be indistinguishable from phishing themselves.

Luckily my parents are appropriately cynical and have not fallen for anything like that, but I know a couple of people of my generation who have (in the worst case losing 5K+ in savings, back when there was no onus on UK banks to take any responsibility for such fraud through their systems so it was properly lost to them).

I told him, next time call the number on the back of your card.

"Sign up for Uber Eats and win 50,000 MXN of credit https://bit.ly/1234"

What's funny is that they also send these over the same channel:

"Warning: Telcel will never call you nor ask you for your personal info!"

Gee, maybe stop priming your whole customer base to click on messages identical to spam?

Or aka.ms

Yes, that is a "best practice" and good internet hygiene is to never click on email and text message urls but the reason they like clicking on legitimate email urls is convenience and usability. A helpful email link directly lands them on the relevant website page to do whatever they need to do. That's because the email url has a long string query parameters (id, etc) that automatically navigates to the correct webpage.

On the other hand, to do it the "best practice" way, it requires clicking around a confusing website menus and drilling several layers deep to find whatever issue the email is talking about.

A helpful email url link bypasses the hassle of learning whatever flavor-of-the-month confusing UI the website designer happened to to use.

Hang around old people and watch over the shoulder how they use computers and you become sympathetic to how the make it work for them.

E.g. An order status email has a URL link of a UPS tracking number to monitor shipping status. But don't click on that! Instead, copy the 1Z... number to the buffer. Then open a web browser and type in the ups.com url. Then paste the number into the text box. Those copy&paste mechanics not too difficult on desktop (Ctrl+C Ctrl-V) but it is much more difficult on mobile phones (double taps or long press and hold).

That was a simple example. The more complicated one is email from health and medical companies with confusing websites. They'd rather just click on the email url.

Yep, and there's even things like irs.gov which tells you how to know a site is official (https, and .gov), and then links you to id.me to login. (not sure what was wrong with login.gov, which SSA lets you use)

“You ever watch MASH? Remember the main guy, Benjamin Franklin Pierce? He’s not the same guy as Benjamin Franklin, is he? You can tell because you don’t stop after the first part of the name you recognize. You have to go all the way to the end and look at the whole name.

Well, same here!”

If my family are anything to go by, they definitely target the elderly more than even one generation down (so it isn't just due to those of the younger generations often only having mobile phones and landlines are more targeted) because they know those tend to be more susceptible to the con and more likely to have some savings worth pillaging.

Also in DayJob, some of our C*s and others associated with them (PAs, office managers) have seen some pretty sophisticated phishing attempts, both targeting the business's dealings and their personal accounts. I get the impression that these are reducing in number ATM (or the filtering of them is improving) but that those coming in are making an increasing effort to be convincing.

In fact, here we have the ma.tt website, where the ".tt" is Trinidad and Tobago. Is Matt Mullenweg from Trinidad? No!