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January 20-05 (7:01 AM
CST)
Mia.Net has
been the target of the Nigerian Spam ring. Several
Nigerians have used outside Satellite providers to
sign up to our service thus gaining access to a
valid Mia.Net email address. As these customers
have signed up using our online form, there is no
reason to suspect them as spammer initially.
However, given the credit card that have been used
are stolen, we have been able to track down the
source and have notified the bank/card holders of
these fraudulent orders. We have further disabled
the auto server setup function of our online sign
up system. New users will be able to sign up for a
new account, but their account will be verified
manually.
So
what does all this mean? Basically some of the
Nigerian accounts were able to send around 2200
spams out of our mia.net mail server. Given there
were 15+ signups from this group of Nigerians, and
even though the fraud was detected almost
immediately, they were able to abuse our system
momentarily. In short this got the mail.mia.net
mail servers listed in a number of anti-spam
databases. We have notified each of these
blacklists of the issue, and have subsequently
asked that they remove the blocks. The removal
process varies from provider to providers, however
we believe that 24 hours or less is the
window.
We
apologize for any inconvenience this may cause as
there is little we can do to prevent this type of
fraud. To avoid problems sending mail, insure you
are using SMTP Auth. Details for setting up SMTP
Auth can be found in our support pages at
http://support.mia.net
Here
is a copy of our removal confirmation from
SpamCop:
Delist
confirmation
209.236.224.195
listed in bl.spamcop.net (127.0.0.2)
209.236.224.195
delisted
Thank you for
securing this system. If spam reports continue, it
may be relisted.
Thank
you.
January 13-04 (12:01 AM
CST)
Hello, we just
wanted to let you know the details of our internet
outage that occurred January 12, 2005. As you know
we strive for the highest possible uptime and
service we can. Given that about 95% of the tools
needed to run our business are provided by 3rd
parties, when problems arise, 95% of them are
completely beyond our control. That said, we have
always taken numerous precautions in the past to
aid in our redundancy.
- We
have multiple providers to the internet.
- We
have multiple connections to each of these
multiple providers.
- We
have multiple points of data entrance to our
facilities.
- We
have multiple routers, multiple, servers, and
the list goes on.
It is
extremely rare that we experience a complete and
total network failure. In fact, prior to yesterdays
outages our entire "network" was reachable for 266
Weeks 4 Days 5 Hours 39 Minutes. Given there are 52
weeks in a year, this is a little over 5 years
without an entire 100% network failure.
Understandably there are times where there have
been partial failures, however it has always been
our goal to insure that our network maintains the
highest level of connectivity at all times. We have
accomplished this over the years by paying dearly
for several redundant forums of connectivity, and
redundant pieces of hardware. Overall, things work
rather well, thought it is impossible to achieve
this 100% of the time. We are realistic, and know
that no one can achieve higher than 99.9999%.
However, we have always strived to do everything we
can to stay as close to 100% and will continue to
do so.
We
have not yet received word from the telco about
what the problems were yesterday, however we are
informed they are still working on whatever the
issues were. What we do know is that we were not
the only customer affected. Several cell carriers
and T1 or higher business customers in our area
were also affected. That said, something major
broke and SBC, MCI, Sprint, and ATT have been
working on it since yesterday, and continue to do
so today to help insure it does not happen again.
Instead of waiting for their response we would
rather let you know that we were working on the
issues closely and doing everything we could to
escalate repairs. In any event, instead of going
into details or speculating about the problem, we
want you to know what we are doing in the future to
help insure it does not happen again.
We
have contacted each of our carriers and asked that
they find a means by which to get portions of our
internet feeds to enter two or more separate paths
into our facility. This also means two or more
separate paths from the telephone company central
office. It really does us no good having all our
redundancy when the incumbent telephone company
does not have redundant paths coming to us.
Finally for the
first time since 12/4/99 we now reset our network
uptime clock:
201 Weeks 3 Days 14 Hours 59 Minutes
My
sincerest apologies for the inconvenience. As you
are aware, this does not happen often and we are
taking measures to insure it does not occur again.
Thank you as always for your business.
Mia.Net
Staff
January 12-05 (4:01 AM
CST)
There appears
to have been a problem wtih our telco services on
the local end. All of our connections to all of our
providers began to fail around 4AM CST. The last
connection failed at 6AM CST. We have not
explanation for the outage yet.
January 1-05 (12:01 AM
CST)
Happy New
Year!
Welcome to the
January 2005. Last months news has been archived to
the
following link.
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