Clicked on phishing link - Help!

[mrjimmy]

Hey all,

I just accidently clicked on a link inside an email sent to my Office 365 account. It showed as 'Report Suspicious', which I hastily assumed was from Microsoft. When It loaded, I realized it wasn't and closed the window. No info was entered.

This was done on my iPhone running iOS 15.4.1.

I have since put the phone on Airplane mode and I'm looking online for what to do next.

Can anyone help me out woth this?

Thanks!

 

[Kenney]

If you have a backup of your phone, I would wipe it, do a restore to a clean OS and then restore from the backup.

 

[Randy B. Singer]

Hey all,

I just accidently clicked on a link inside an email sent to my Office 365 account. It showed as 'Report Suspicious', which I hastily assumed was from Microsoft. When It loaded, I realized it wasn't and closed the window.
....Can anyone help me out woth this?

By and large, there is little (bad) that can happen from visiting a Web site on your iPhone, assuming that you didn't give them any personal information. iOS doesn't download software from Web sites, so you can't be infected by one. iOS can only download software from the Apple App Store.

Basically...there is no malware for your iPhone. Since the only potential vector for getting malware is the Apple App Store, and since all software in the Apple App Store is vetted by Apple, there is no way for malware to get onto your iPhone.

(There have been extremely rare cases where a developer has been able to sneak malware through Apple's vetting process, but Apple always has found out and disabled the software immediately. Malware just isn't a thing for iOS.)

You can be fooled by a social engineering exploit though. So don't give out any information, or call any phone numbers, etc. unless you are very sure who you are dealing with.

 

[mrjimmy]

By and large, there is little (bad) that can happen from visiting a Web site on your iPhone, assuming that you didn't give them any personal information. iOS doesn't download software from Web sites, so you can't be infected by one. iOS can only download software from the Apple App Store.

Basically...there is no malware for your iPhone. Since the only potential vector for getting malware is the Apple App Store, and since all software in the Apple App Store is vetted by Apple, there is no way for malware to get onto your iPhone.

(There have been extremely rare cases where a developer has been able to sneak malware through Apple's vetting process, but Apple always has found out and disabled the software immediately. Malware just isn't a thing for iOS.)

You can be fooled by a social engineering exploit though. So don't give out any information, or call any phone numbers, etc. unless you are very sure who you are dealing with.

Thanks Randy. Very reassuring. I found some info online regarding this, but it was all over the map.

When I went back on my iMac to investigate the offending email, the 'report suspicious' appeared separate from body of the email. and when I hovered over the link I hit, it takes you to proofpoint.com, which I believe is something the institution where I work uses to protect against phishing etc. (see attached).

So basically a false alarm. Hard to tell on my phone when I was tired though...

I did however download the VirusBarrier scanner app and ran it on both my iMac and laptop. 8 files (all Word doc mail attachments) were sent into quarantine. Waiting on the results from the laptop.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

If you quickly closed the window and didn't take any specific action on a website, you are perfectly fine on the iPhone. You would likely be fine on a Mac as well as long as you have some adblock extension installed or are using a browser that normally blocks things (like Brave).

In the current climate, you're better of being skeptical of EVERYTHING you get and always taking extra steps to validate things before clicking on stuff. As more and more of our stuff is moved onto devices, a compromise of that device is a lot more detrimental.

 

[Randy B. Singer]

I found some info online regarding this, but it was all over the map.

People are very paranoid about malware and will often give you inaccurate advice with regard to the Macintosh, because folks don't realize that the Macintosh isn't like Windows.

It's not surprising, there are literally *millions* of examples of malware for Windows. For the Macintosh there are only a handful, and most of those are either now extinct in the wild, or patched against.

I did however download the VirusBarrier scanner app and ran it on both my iMac and laptop. 8 files (all Word doc mail attachments) were sent into quarantine. Waiting on the results from the laptop.

Typically what you will receive via e-mail are files that on the surface appear to be Microsoft Word documents, but they are really malware...Windows malware. Some Windows malware actually self-propagates by e-mailing itself out from an infected computer. No Macintosh malware does that. If you look at the report in VirusBarrier you will almost certainly find that those files that it found are Windows malware that is harmless to the Macintosh. (There used to be a scorge of malicious Word macros that were cross-platform, but for well over a decade now Word had included "Macro Virus Protection", so those are just about non-existant now.)

By and large, malware just about never shows up on a Macintosh via e-mail. The little malware that exists for the Mac are Trojan Horses, not actual viruses, and they are usually disseminated via downloads that you do volitionally from sketchy sources, such as illegal file sharing networks or more rarely, malicious Web sites offering what seems like a legitimate download.

 

[Randy B. Singer]

You might find this free video interesting from MacMost:

Do Macs Need Anti-Virus Software?
https://macmost.com/the-practical-guide-to-mac-security-part-9-do-you-need-anti-virus-software.html

 

[Groovetube]

One of the benefits of the apple ecosystem.

something I don’t miss from my days in windows!