SCAMS

I Laughed When My Wife Got a “Your Mac Is Infected — call Apple Now” Message and Then I Thought About Cyber-Politics

iPads don’t run Mac operating systems — at least not yet

My wife’s iPad and a book from a former life — photo by author

Yesterday my wife called me to her side. “Look at this”, she said, pointing at a message on her screen that warned her to call Apple because her Mac was infected. The page helpfully provided a phone number to click on.

I laughed, not at her, but at whoever coded the ad that had triggered this message. The message was on her iPad and she doesn’t use a Mac. I showed her how to go into Settings->Safari->Clear History and Website Data to get rid of the message that had her Safari locked up and we went on about our day.

Then I started thinking. Sure, the scammer could be just wastefully targetting whoever and whatever. But IOS 15 Private Relay is giving them a false IP address; could it be that whatever that address was last seen on was a Mac? Or is Apple perhaps fighting fingerprinting by putting up a misleading random user agent in Safari?

Eh, who knows? But it reminded me about the recent news that Apple is suing the Israeli NSO Group company. That’s a private company that sells hacking software called Pegasus to countries around the world…