Protecting yourself from email phishing scam attempts

Phishing emails are sent from criminals in an attempt to glean your identifying information to commit identity fraud, gather your financial information, and a whole host of other unsavory business. These criminals attempt to fool you by disguising themselves as a trusted source, such as hosting.com.

Phishing emails often encourage you to take some sort of action on your hosting account, such as updating your address or credit card number. Follow our phishing scam protection tips below to help keep your information safe.

How to tell if an email is legitimate

Phishing emails typically have links to sophisticated pages posing as legitimate site pages. These pages usually pose as portals where you would supply sensitive information, such as the official login page of hosting.com. However, these pages instead send any and all information you have supplied on the page (such as your username and password) to those perpetrating the scam.

As frustrating as dealing with phishing attempts can be, it’s not too hard to verify legitimate attempts from those made by with nefarious intentions. Check out the tips below if you’re wondering whether or not you’ve received a legitimate email from hosting.com:

• If you receive a suspicious email requesting that you log into your account, do not click any login links included in the email. Instead, visit https://my.hosting.com/ directly and log into your account from there. This tip can be used to protect yourself from any online phishing scam, not just those targeting hosting.com.

• Never submit confidential information in a form embedded within an email message.

• Before clicking any link within an email, hover your pointer over the link to verify that the destination URL correlates to the destination you’re expecting. The page that will open if you click the link should appear near the pointer or on the status bar. The link should match the description provided.

• Hosting.com will never ask you to provide your password, credit card number, or any other personal information directly through email.

• Hosting.com will only ever email the address that you have provided to us. Check which address you have received correspondence on.

• If we ever do request information or action from you, we do so within our support ticket system. The most secure way to reply to us is to go directly to https://my.hosting.com/, log in, and submit your reply directly on our website.

How can I help keep my login information secure?

You can double check that you are logging in to the correct site by ensuring that your browser has verified the credentials for https://my.hosting.com:

If the credentials are not verified, do not submit your login credentials on the page.

What do I do if I’m still unsure of an email?

If you are ever in doubt, contact us! Support is available day or night to answer your questions, and this includes account security questions as well as phishing scam protection. By following the tips listed above, you can help keep your account safe. However, if you are still unsure about the legitimacy of an email that you have received, please contact us at https://my.hosting.com for verification.