Vent: Almost got phished at a coffee shop in Portland last Saturday

I was at Stumptown on Division grabbing a latte and hopped on their guest wifi. Typed in my email to check something and got a fake Gmail login page that looked identical. Caught it because the URL said g00gle instead of google. Has anyone else run into fake wifi portals like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

wesley_grant335d ago

I ran into almost the exact same thing at a Peet's in San Francisco last month. The login page looked totally legit, even had the blue Google logo and everything, but I noticed the URL was something like g00gle-signin dot com. It's scary how good these fakes are getting. I mean, I almost typed in my password before my brain caught up. Now I always double check the address bar even on coffee shop wifi.

the_claire5d ago

Oh man @wesley_grant33, that's almost exactly what happened to me too. What finally worked for me was just using a VPN on public wifi now, period. I grabbed one of those cheap month to month ones and it autoconnects before I even open a browser so the fake portal never gets a chance to trick me. Plus I set my phone to forget any open networks I used before so it doesn't autojoin anything sketchy. Sucks we have to be this careful just to check email but way better than getting our accounts stolen.