Over the last week, some of our shared hosting clients have been targeted by a rather complex email attack that is focusing on clients using cPanel based hosting, like we use at Webmad.
The attack first detects if the website hosting is cPanel based, and then if it can locate a contact email address form the website, it emails the contact with an email that looks like a legitimate cPanel disk space usage warning email, requesting you take various actions to protect your website from downtime.
This typically looks like the following:
So the key components of the email to look out for are:
- If you hover your mouse over the links in the email, they are not the same as the link text. This is a huge red flag, as it is misleading you as to where you think you are being directed.
- The From address always has ‘no-reply@’ at the start – most hosting providers will customise this so it comes from them, not from your own domain name
- The disk usage percentage is always over 95%
Please ignore these emails, and if you have followed any of the links, do let your hosting provider know as soon as possible, as it is possible that details you provide on the links will lead to compromising your websites hosting security – its best to work through with your hosting provider the best course of action from here.
For Webmad hosted clients – we don’t actually have set disk quotas on our hosting, so we can assure you you will never receive any legitimate emails like this from us – we prefer to contact you directly, using humans not automation. Contact us if you ever have any concerns.
Stay safe out there everyone!