Beware secure DNS scam targeting website owners and bloggers

If you run a website or a blog, you probably use a cloud provider or a dedicated hosting company to manage your server and deliver the content to your readers, viewers, and listeners.

We certainly do – both Naked Security and our sister site Sophos News is hosted by WordPress VIP.

That’s not a secret (nor is it meant to be), not least because most providers identify themselves in the HTTP headers they send back in their web replies, if only as a matter of courtesy:

Because your choice of hosting provider is usually easy enough for anyone to figure out, you probably already receive your fair share of spam from companies saying, “Hey, I see you use web provider X, and we just happen to have enormous expertise in that area, so why not contact us…”

…and we’re willing to bet that you have lots of reasons why not, including that you don’t much like receiving unsolicited emails trying to drum up business.

We certainly get our fair share of spams of that sort, typically saying they can help us switch providers, optimize our content, boost our Google ranking, and so on.

But over the weekend we received a message that was a bit more believable than the rest.

This scam pretended to come from WordPress itself, and claimed that DNS security features would soon be added for our domain:

We’re upgrading your domain DNS for something even better, freely!