Identifying legitimacy of suspicious emails

Suspicious emails are common and usually indicate that your email was leaked or targeted. To stay safe:

✔ Check the sender email domain

✔ Inspect links BEFORE opening

✔ Ignore attachments

✔ Watch for poor grammar and threats

✔ NEVER use links inside the email — verify through the official app or website

✔ Report to Apple at reportphishing@apple.com

✔ Enable iPhone mail protections

✔ Check if your email appeared in data breaches

• Did you sign into a login.gov account recently such as Social Security or other Government agency?
• Are you using a VPN?

Those important questions need to be answered. Otherwise you need to manually go to the Login.gov website and review the activity. It is never a bad idea to regularly change your passwords and do not reuse them from another service. NEVER click a link in an email and provide personal information. The sender email email domain can be "spoofed" so that is not an option to determine if an email is legitimate.

Suggest you change your login.gov password — NOT from the link provided — immediately (if only for more “peace of mind”)…

… and then going forward, implement hardware security keys to strengthen your login.gov authentication process.

No one is ever a nuisance when they take the time to ask an important question. Or ones less so.

However, the hosts would frown on questions like, "What's for dinner?" 🙂

You’re welcome.

FYI, that email of yours “looks” EXACTLY like a real login.gov alert notification I just received.

If it’s a fake … it’s a cosmetically very good one.

It is a real place:

https://login.gov/

But, that doesn't mean any of the links in that email will go to where they say. It's trivial to make text look like a link that doesn't go anywhere near what it ways. Like this:

http://www.amazon.com

This in particular is where azaksalmarzur28's second point (✔ Inspect links BEFORE opening) comes in. Tap and hold on a link to see where it really goes. The linked URL should appear. It's pretty much a guarantee reset your password doesn't go to the login.gov site.