SKY Yahoo email hacked

[Vizsla]

There is a well-known scam that's been around for a while where the scam email purports to be from SKY, saying your email account needs to be upgraded or your account will be closed.

Unfortunately ......... this was not well-known to Mrs Vizsla, who in a moment of madness (she's normally VERY security-conscious) responded giving them our SKY email username and password. Eeeeeek!

Twigged soon after that this was a scam and tried to change PW but got an error page. Contacted SKY (twice) who were less than helpful and in the end gave up, somewhat reassured (wrongly!) that the account has 2 level verification, sending a 6-digit code to your mobile. Notified friends that they may get scam emails purporting to be from us.

Nothing happened for 2 weeks, then friends started texting that they had recd scam emails, the scam email basically saying "Help Needed" and seeking a reply. They must have sent emails to everyone in our address book as even Octopus got one! Presumably anyone who replies gets drawn into sending money transfers or Amazon/Apple gift cards/tokens to them via our hijacked email.

Eventually sorted after several calls to SKY, the scammers had also managed to set a filter sending our incoming mail into Archive, in our Mailbox had added their own email address as a recipient, replaced our email address in the 'send to' field with their own, and also changed our user ID on sent emails to 'SKY'. Bastids!

Question for any IT wizards out there: How did they manage to get past the 2nd level verification? While we were sorting this with SKY there were several codes sent to our mobile so they were obviously trying.

Lessons learnt!!

[eeLee]

Vizsla said:

Question for any IT wizards out there: How did they manage to get past the 2nd level verification? While we were sorting this with SKY there were several codes sent to our mobile so they were obviously trying.

Probably down to a fallback method that you can use when your 2FA fails or is not working.

[Vizsla]

eeLee said:

Vizsla said:

Question for any IT wizards out there: How did they manage to get past the 2nd level verification? While we were sorting this with SKY there were several codes sent to our mobile so they were obviously trying.

Probably down to a fallback method that you can use when your 2FA fails or is not working.

Thanks for the reply, must say I'm a bit disillusioned by this (yes, I know we were to blame) but what is the point of 2FA if the scammers can bypass it? I had (wrongly) believed that 2FA was the gold standard of extra security, and during our various contacts with the SKY helpline they repeatedly assured us that 2FA would prevent the scammers from accessing our account - but they did!

[outnumbered]

Vizsla said:

Thanks for the reply, must say I'm a bit disillusioned by this (yes, I know we were to blame) but what is the point of 2FA if the scammers can bypass it? I had (wrongly) believed that 2FA was the gold standard of extra security, and during our various contacts with the SKY helpline they repeatedly assured us that 2FA would prevent the scammers from accessing our account - but they did!

For instance:

https://zitadel.com/blog/2fa-bypass-attacks

[Vizsla]

outnumbered said:

Vizsla said:

Thanks for the reply, must say I'm a bit disillusioned by this (yes, I know we were to blame) but what is the point of 2FA if the scammers can bypass it? I had (wrongly) believed that 2FA was the gold standard of extra security, and during our various contacts with the SKY helpline they repeatedly assured us that 2FA would prevent the scammers from accessing our account - but they did!

For instance:

https://zitadel.com/blog/2fa-bypass-attacks

Thanks, very informative, if a little daunting for barely computer literate numpties such as myself!