Summary
DreamHost customers are the latest to be targeted by scammers. An example of a fake message is below.
Message Content
- Subject: Reminder: Domain names expiring
- Message: Your payment method isn’t valid. It appears that one or more items in your account were unable to be renewed. Nonetheless, this can be easily resolved as long as you take care of it promptly.
Appearance
The colors, fonts, logo, and other branding elements are almost identical to official emails from the website hosting company DreamHost. So, they are likely to mislead people into providing their login credentials.
Example of Scam Email Message
Below is a sample of a scam email pretending to be from DreamHost.
Identifying Fake Emails
To identify the authenticity of emails, a good practice is to check the sender’s email address. In this example, we can see the message was not actually sent from DreamHost. Depending on your email system, you will choose the option to show the address of the sender. The enlarged example below is using Apple Mail.
Most email software and services allow you to hover your mouse over links and clickable buttons. Point only. Do not click on any links or buttons. The enlarged example below shows how the URL will be displayed when you hover your mouse/pointer arrow over the button or link.
So, from the examples above, we can see the email did not originate from DreamHost.
Regardless of the source of an email, you would always want to go directly to the official website and not use any links in an email.