Hi everyone!
A friend (who thinks she’s still on iOS 13) says she accidentally clicked on one of the fake FedEx “delivery” texts.
She saw it was sending her to a “prize type site” and closed everything.
From what I’ve read/Googled, the risk seems to be a phishing scheme and one is only in trouble if they play-along and enter credit card data, etc.
Is the iOS text app (and presumably Safari on iOS) locked down enough to keep strange scripts out?
I used to know guys who enjoyed exploring those things on “disposable” computers or ones that they did no real work on/kept free of account and personal data. I am not one of those guys!
She’s resetting a few passwords from other devices and I’m going to encourage her to update her iOS to the latest version.
She told me this all via iOS messaging and I have not gotten any strange texts or emails with “attachments” from her, etc. … Just checked FB, no “I think this is you in this video” messages(!).
Any other thoughts/recommendations for her?
Thank you!
If she didn’t enter any information then she’s probably okay. I always strongly recommend running up to date software, as the sorts of things that infect you by just by visiting a page usually rely on the clicker running an out of date browser with known exploitable bugs.
(After user-error, unpatched systems are probably the biggest IT security problem. The two compete on a daily basis as to which will be the one that drives me to drink that evening.)
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She’ll be fine, no need to change passwords either. Practically the only malicious way to mess with iOS is to install a custom profile with a VPN or something to redirect traffic. It is pretty involved and not easy to do so she would have noticed.
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About the only thing she did is confirm the phone nr or AppleID is “live”, and that she’s likely to click.
That in itself is a shame because it can lead to her getting more and more spam or phishing texts. Something to watch out for
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Thank you all! I was thinking much the same. Very glad to hear other, smarter folks from the tech community reinforce my suspicions.
She’s pretty wary but has accidentally clicked on a few things over the years (usually when in a hurry).
I think something like it happened to me more than a decade ago when some very useful software had an approval window buried among the others during the installation process. It was something like, “Install (name of software I can’t remember; but had nothing to do with the original program)?” and the check box was checked. All designed to trap busy tech people into clicking “Ok, Ok, Ok,…” to get the job done.
Then it installed something awful (Windows) that was hard to uninstall and had to be had to be dug out of the registry.
Thanks again!!