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.
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 intelligence 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.
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.
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'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?
You can try: https://support.google.com/mail/contact/abuse?hl=en
I submitted an account that sent phishing emails last week, but I’m told it’s basically a black hole and to not expect anything anything to happen.
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.
Is something similar happening with paypal? I've been getting seemly emails from the PayPal domain that are obviously a scam.
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".
PayPal itself is a scam.
I mean, it happened to the FBI... https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/11/hoax-email-blast-abused-...
>The FBI is aware of a software misconfiguration
That's not a misconfiguration, that's incompetence.
How do these people get hired?
How does it work when a genuine microsoft domain is spending out spam?
Do other email providers penalize that specific domain only, or all microsoft domains to a tiny degree?
The domain is Microsoftonline.com
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.
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shocking..
Pretty apropos and quite ironically encapsulates what Microsoft has turned into over the past few years in particular.
Imagine this is some truly errant copilot instance truly embracing its slop destiny.
lol
Did anyone there try to ask ChatGPT to come up with a solution?
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.
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.
That's the number one rule though. If someone calls you claiming to be your bank, just say "I'll call you back"
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.)
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
Truecaller can tell you about who a phone number belongs to.
Truecaller cannot accurately tell you whether or not the person calling you from a phone number is actually in control of that phone number.
Bluesky is even worse, some of their emails come from "moderation@blueskyweb.xyz".
They have to make posts to assure people it's not a scam, especially as they'll ask you to mail ID etc to that address:
https://bsky.app/profile/safety.bsky.app/post/3ljp6zi7tp227
Microsoft is the 4th largest company in the world.
There should be a long list of companies whose policies are worse than theirs.
Sending your id to a social media IS a scam.
By email... Just to add insult to injury
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?
Defining a word isn't "highbrow shenanigans", although I guess it depends on how you define that.
At least Bluesky has an excuse of not being a Fortune 50 company. What’s Microsoft’s excuse?
‘We built it 30 years ago, it’s sort of compatible with everything and we will never deprecate.’
It’s not a good excuse…
> 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.
> unable publish a list with all domains they officially use to send mail
That's because people report them as spam, so they hop domains to avoid that.
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
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.
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.
https://github.com/HotCakeX/MicrosoftDomains
...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:
https://whois.domaintools.com/microsoftonline.com
but microsoftgenuinerewardsrc.com is! shameful!
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.
> Who even can be sure microsoftonline.com is legit
Spam filters.
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.
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.