Be on your guard against fake Apple emails and texts designed to exploit the publicity of this week’s nude celeb picture flap.
Scam emails have been send out designed to trick gullible recipients into logging into phishing sites, Symantec warns of a likely upsurge in fraudulent text messages falsely claiming to be from Apple Protection or another privacy or security group within Apple.
“The text claims that an unauthorised attempt to sign in to the users’ iCloud account was detected and they need to respond back with their Apple ID and password or have their account locked out,” Symantec security response manager Satnam Narang explains in a blog post.
The objective of both of these SMS-ishing (SMS/text phishing) scams is identical to that of the email phishing spam runs: an attempt to steal Apple ID credentials. Crooks can either carry out fraud using compromised iTunes accounts or otherwise sell these credentials through underground hacking forums. “Whether or not iCloud was the point of compromise in this incident, scammers have been interested in stealing these credentials [Apple IDs] for some time,” Symantec adds.