If one of your wishes for 2019 was for less hacks, it seems like the year might already be off to a bad start. According to a report from Apple World Today, it seems that on the 1st of January, 2019, a new iCloud phishing attempt had started to make its rounds already, where like pretty much all phishing attempts, tries to trick the user into handing over confidential information.
The attempt is rather straightforward where an email is sent claiming that the user’s iCloud account had been temporary disabled due to “security reasons”. This is apparently due to someone in another country attempting to sign into their device, and because of that, “Apple” tried to protect your account by disabling it.
It then tells users to go to Apple’s website by providing a link, and asking them to unlock their password with the existing password. Presumably that is where the user’s login information will be stolen. It even warns them that if they do not do this in the next 24 hours, their account will be permanently disabled.
Safe to say if you do come across such an email, the best thing to do would be to ignore it and delete it. There are several ways to check whether or not the email is genuine, one of which involves looking at the email from the sender where it should be from an “apple.com” account. However since emails can be spoofed, another way is to try and log into your iCloud account manually by going to Apple’s website by typing in the URL yourself. If there is no issue there, then no action is required on your end other than to delete the email and maybe mark it as spam.