IT & Communications

Following the business-crippling actions by Namesco Limited which attempted to migrate our Group's websites to their servers yesterday, after 12 hours we continue to have several sites down or cannot be reached and more with problems of one kind or another. We have been and continue to press Names.co.uk to resolve the problems they have caused but have no faith in their ability or willingness to do so. We regret the inconvenience to our customers and clients as a result of these failures which are entirely outside our control. The list below includes both our own sites and sites we manage. It is not exhaustive: we are still working through all our sites to identify the scale of the problems.

We've had enough of spam from a group of servers that is being a serious nuisance. And they all have one thing in common: they are investment related, in one form or another.

Working on the assumption that, if all victims adopt this policy spammers can be at least a little frustrated, this is what we have written to the company hosting the servers because, by reducing the business the ISP can do, there may be some pressure to be brought to bear on them to prevent their servers being used for spam.

A carefully addressed but badly worded e-mail spam has arrived and it's got the potential to suck in many users across organisations.

It's registration spam-scam time again. This one, originating from a spurious domain, (.pw domains are much loved by fraudsters and other internet criminals and this one is no exception) is one of the most bizarre e-mails ever and is therefore likely to succeed.

This is our personal story and we are mightily pissed off. Our long-time internet hosting company was recently acquired by UK hosting company NamesCo. We don't want to use them. The reasons are immaterial. We simply want to transfer all of our domain names to a host of our choice who trade on terms we like and deal with us in a way we want to be dealt with. NamesCo wants to obstruct that and demands what amounts, in our eyes, to a ransom payment to release the domain names which are, after all, our intellectual property because they are terms of art we created.

Do the terms of access to your company's website contain provisions as to what may be accessed and for what purposes? Do you, for example, point out that domain names and e-mail addresses are terms of art and therefore protected under copyright legislation? Do you say that, as a result, harvesting that data, and other information that may be subject to data protection, is illegal? Do you say that anyone who accesses your website intending to breach the terms of access is unauthorised and that unauthorised access is a criminal offence?

Meet Raj Yadav. He wants you to pay him to do all of those things. If you use him, or his company, then you are conspiring to commit those offences and, even though he's apparently in a jurisdiction where he might be difficult to reach, the chances are you are not. Now: where did your latest mailing list data come from?

Thanks to The Harvey Boys, Phil and Rob, for providing us with outstanding service for almost two decades at their company UK Servers Limited, trading as Virtual Names. It's only right that I publicly thank them for all the support they have given me and my companies over the years, says Nigel Morris-Cotterill.

The email is doomed to be subject to review because the idiot sender has spoofed the recipient's address and used it as the sender's address. But, otherwise, for the unwary, in the period leading up to critical gift delivery period, the scam has a high chance of success.

When we found this address was the source for a brute-force attack by hackers on our own administration system, we checked and found that it's being used to mount attacks on Drupal CMS systems around the world.

RECOMMENDATION: BLOCK IT AND PREVENT IT REACHING YOUR CMS.

When was the last time you logged onto Google +? With even Google's own search engine prioritising members' pages on Facebook, and G+ pages listed far, far away, if at all, one has to wonder if it's still there at all. But, apparently, it's not dead and it's not dying. It's just hovering in that netherland where MySpace, AoL and a handful of others still function at a viable level but will never (again) be stars. But it raises the question - why not run a niche service? And if you do, can you make it relevant to users instead of becoming a totalitarian environment?

We reproduce below, unedited, the full text of two announcements by US-CERT, the US government cyber security office, relating to the HIDDEN COBRA virus which contains information in addition to that previously published.

Today, the US cyber security office, US-CERT has issued a renewed warning about HIDDEN COBRA which it describes as a "spear phishing" virus.

What does that mean?

Common Internet of Things Devices May Expose Consumers to Cyber Exploitation
17 October, 2017
Source: https://www.ic3.gov/media/2017...
Full content below (verbatim)

The UK's Home Office has announced that it intends to "update" anti terrorism laws to identify and act against those who use the internet in ways that suggest that they may be "radicalised" or in some other way involved with terrorism or a terrorist act, or the preparation for such an act.

A new form of spam-scam has come to our attention. We understand that this has not been widely seen before. Its nature is that it is likely that many receiving the email will click on links.