A new type of phishing scam has appeared in the last few days, one targeting website owners. The emails are being sent to the administrative contacts of website domains and are pretending to come from your website hosting / domain registration company. These emails claim that after multiple warnings your domain is going to be suspended for violation of the abuse policies. They obviously want you to click on a link that takes you to a web page and if you continue the process you will end up loosing information to these people.
If you are wondering how these people get hold of your information, it is coming from the publicly available WHOIS listings that relates to the contacts for your website. Although you can either opt for a privacy setting with many domain management companies, or you can ask your hosting company to use their details for the administrative & technical contacts, if you have already got one or more of these emails you are already on the hackers database.
This example again shows that compromising personal details & passwords pays enough to try more and more inventive ways to do it if you are a criminal. A golden rule to apply with ANY of these emails you may get is if you think it is real, don’t EVER click on the link. Instead log in to that specific website directly by typing their web address into your browser, or via a Google search, and then once you are logged in if it is true then you will get a notification here.
If you are the head of a business ensure that ALL of your staff know NOT to click on these links as a single employee falling for a scam could compromise your entire company’s computer infrastructure and data! Remember to always keep your anti-virus and anti-malware software up to date by paying for a subscription and perform regular scans of your computers.
