Hover, Canada-based Internet services and telecommunications company Tucows, one of the world’s largest ICANN-accredited domain registrars, has reset its user passwords after discovering that one of its systems might have been breached.
Once it reset passwords, the company started sending emails to the customers on Tuesday.
“We are writing to let you know that we reset your password today. If you are unable to log into your Hover account, you will need to use the “I forgot my password” option on the sign in page to change your password,” the email read.
“We did this as a precautionary measure because there appears to have been a brief period of time when unauthorized access to one of our systems could have occurred. We have no evidence at all that any Hover accounts have been accessed, but even the possibility that this could have happened moved us to err on the side of extreme caution,” the company explained to its customers.
According to a post in SecurityWeek, unfortunately, as it often happens, the emails sent out by Hover have been mistaken for phishing attempts due to the URLs they contain.
However, the company confirmed it in twitter that the password reset emails are legitimate and clarified that the links have likely been changed by MailChimp, the email marketing product that was used to send out the notifications.
“That email was indeed from us. The links were changed when sending out through MailChimp. Sorry for the confusion,” Hover replied one of its followers in Twitter.
The company told SecurityWeek on Monday that it had not been able to determine the exact attack vector used by the hackers. However, it suspected that they may have leveraged a zero-day exploit since the breached server was fully patched.