An email saying Apple Account Audit coming from Apple <[email protected]> is a phishing email that is designed to steal your Apple/ITunes account details as well as your credit card & other bank details

Other subjects in this phishing scam include

  • iCloud Account Audit

This one wants your personal details and your credit card and bank details. Many of them are also designed to specifically steal your email, facebook and other social network log in details.

We all get very blasé about phishing and think we know so much that we will never fall for a phishing attempt. Don’t assume that all attempts are obvious. Watch for any site that invites you to enter ANY personal or financial information. It might be an email that says “you have won a prize” or “sign up to this website for discounts, prizes and special offers”

Please read our How to protect yourselves page for simple, sensible advice on how to avoid being infected by this sort of socially engineered malware.

The original email looks like this, . It will NEVER be a genuine email from Apple or any other Apple related company or webservice so don’t ever follow the links in the email

Please confirm your iCloud ID.
A verification email was previously sent to [REDACTED]. We have resent the verification email to this address as you had not completed the verificaiton in time. This is the final e-mail before your iCloud & Apple ID are suspended.
Verify now >
Sincerely, Apple Support
My Apple ID | Support | Privacy Policy
Copyright © 2021 iTunes Sarl 31-33, Rue Sainte Zithe, L-2763 Luxembourg‎ All Rights Reserved.
The link in the email goes to http://itunesconsumerhelp.com/myicloud/[email protected]

There are other ones of these around and other sites being used all with the /myicloud/[email protected] webfolder and referrer include

http://appleicloudcustomerservice.org
If you open the attached html file you see a webpage looking like:

What is really annoying and difficult to deal with is the way the phisher has set up the website so that unless you either click through from the email or insert a email address in the format they require, you get a fake domain suspended notice. This makes it very difficult to report to the various anti-phishing organisations or browser block list, who check the domain without an email referrer and see it as suspended so do not add it to block lists. Or add it only with the particular email referrer that was submitted.

The emails come from real newly created domains that sound and look like genuine Apple domains. The emails all have proper SPF and DKIM headers to help them get past spam filters. It is time that the domain registrars started to tweak their automatic allowing of domain registrations and start to check properly for genuine registrants details and check the domain name against list of names/ companies typically used in phishing/spoofing.

This particular set of domains is newly created

Headers to email look like

Received: from [81.4.125.186] (port=50583 helo=icloudresources.co.uk)
by [redacted] with esmtp (Exim 4.86)
(envelope-from <[email protected]>)
id 1a4S4F-000413-NJ
for [redacted]; Thu, 03 Dec 2021 11:28:56 +0000
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha1; c=relaxed/relaxed; s=default; d=icloudresources.co.uk;
h=To:Subject:Date:From:Reply-To:MIME-Version:Content-Type:Content-Transfer-Encoding:Message-ID; [email protected];
bh=i/otYmLmFjOFdLRlE3qNNTCv/yM=;
b=GmeV6ZBMGut4M6OfPFan7R/hxP92tCmH515GdwbMx5Hx8QbncauAJELYFN+N/kT3fBybBcLR1aNA
sXzx8xfBtusiN/2nCZ+nJmgXNhM8XUyzzrpq8XxCzmeE3+3U5e0J8lGHoz9FaY0YT7DZgIVb1MNv
SOPeJviU08o9gfWibpI=
DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; q=dns; s=default; d=icloudresources.co.uk;
b=Cpr3MxslOvqRPdQ1t/6SrFebSSJTI7LGurgkNzvGBSLpFUZvsJgblfrcm/YM1GUen7U85JmCVU4y
3EIzzRmyhMBrI8n6Nz+2jc4e8z/TRROC5kU2J2ECnECudHqCvjGBlZ2zut6EYUXGBoaVkagOvDHS
ag89ntRR9v2x1Gtaxzs=;
To: [redacted] Subject: Apple Account Audit
Date: Thu, 03 Dec 2021 11:28:25 +0000
From: “Apple” <[email protected]>
Reply-To: [email protected]
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=”UTF-8″
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
From:
[email protected]

All of these emails use Social engineering tricks to persuade you to open the attachments that come with the email. Whether it is a message saying “look at this picture of me I took last night” and it appears to come from a friend or is more targeted at somebody who regularly is likely to receive PDF attachments or Word .doc attachments or any other common file that you use every day. Or whether it is a straight forward attempt, like this one, to steal your personal, bank, credit card or email and social networking log in details.

Be very careful when unzipping them and make sure you have “show known file extensions enabled“, And then look carefully at the unzipped file. If it says .EXE then it is a problem and should not be run or opened.