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userbinator 2 days ago

Step 3: Attacker sends the email from Outlook

AFAIK you can't spoof the path listed in the Received: headers as all the servers on the path will add their own. That's always been my way of verifying where emails come from, and it's reassuring to know that I would've caught this one too. Emails coming from Google aren't going to take a detour through Microsoft servers.

KevinMS 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

You cant spoof the header of the last trusted server, that's it.

emsixteen 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you don't manually check the headers for every single email, or even only every one from Google and co, so are you doing something to flag or visualise this in some way?

tharkun__ a day ago | parent | next [-]

I'm with the person you are replying to here.

Whenever I get an email that seems like it's a scam or scary like this I will open headers and the Received headers (sometimes even a From et. al. are enough) will give it away.

In zero cases did I care about SPF, DMARC or DKIM.

I recognize that this is not something non technical people or even technical people that don't know how email works and that don't have a broader technical ability/knowledge can usually use/do but it has worked 100% for me so far. knocks on wood.

I literally only skimmed the article looking for any place they might show all headers and finally when they had the list of Received I was like: duuuh, that's the first you should have looked at and this would be a non blog.

So of course it's still bad this happens as most folks, even technical ones, couldn't read email headers to save their lives and rely on little badges and filters based on things like DKIM to keep them safe.

userbinator a day ago | parent | prev [-]

The sibling comment basically answered for me; I don't check the headers unless I'm feeling suspicious, and such an immediate urgent call-to-action definitely counts as suspicious.

It helps that I'm using a client which shows all the headers by default, and I normally just scroll past them if I don't have doubts; all the mainstream consumerist ones seem to make that very difficult or even impossible.

If anything, it seems hiding these details is a way to increase blind trust in things like DKIM and promote learned helplessness, so they have the incentive to make clients opaque.