Based on the current value of the Zambian kwacha in US dollars and recent trends, we are increasing our retail kwacha prices effective today and until the next quarterly review by about 15%.
Some sample rates:
Our new kwacha rates will be online within 24 hours.
As Christmas rapidly approaches, we’d like to remind you of two limitations to keep in mind with respect to sending email, and to implore you once again to take phishing scams seriously.
Within the last year or two we have had to implement a limit of sending to 300 email recipients per day per email account. This is a limit that hardly anyone runs up against, but it does happen. The reason for this is quite simple: email accounts are hacked when a computer or phone is compromised, and the person or organisation who has compromised the account then uses the account to send spam or phishing messages. If there was no limit on how many messages can be sent in a day they’d send millions! If this happens, our IP addresses are blacklisted and then none of our clients can send any emails outside of our network.
With this limit in place messages to only 300 recipients can be sent, and by the time the 24 hours are up a compromise will have been noticed, and the password for the email account can be reset. (We often notice these spam runs when they are in progress, and they are shut down before more than a few dozen are sent.) Experience has shown that if 300 such messages are sent, that seems to be just below the point at which damage to our IP addresses’ reputation is done. We experimented with a limit of 400, but damage was still done.
If you’re going to send messages to a few hundred or thousand of your customers we suggest the following:
Please note that however you chose to send mass emails you must have documented proof that you’ve received permission from the recipients to send them non-personal emails like this. If you don’t have that permission, then don’t send them those emails. It’s quite simple. If you don’t have permission you cannot defend yourself against accusations of spamming, and you risk your account being suspended and removed.
Also note that the limit is the number of recipients. If you send an email to Bob, copy it to Jane and blind copy it to Jim, that’s 3 of your 300 recipients (not “1 message”). If you send another email to the same people, that’s now 6. If you send one email blind-copied to 300 recipients, you’re done for the day and you can go home. 🙂
We often see clients trying to send emails with restricted attachments. Our mail server stops emails with executable attachments (.exe files, for example, but there are more and it’s not the file name extension that determines if a file is executable) and documents that contain macros, or scripts that can be executed when the document is opened. These cannot be sent by email because they could contain malicious code. If you want to send these files to someone else we suggest that you either use what’s called the “sneakernet” — put the file on a flash drive and walk it over (perhaps wearing “sneakers”) to the person you want to give the file to — put the flash drive in the postal mail, or upload the file to a website or file upload service from where someone can download it.
Many office-type documents — spreadsheets, word processing documents, slide shows, etc. — contain macros (scripts), which you may or may not be aware of, and if you’re trying to send them they will not reach the intended recipient. Sometimes when you create a PDF file from an office document the scripts are embedded in the PDF, and those will be blocked for the same reason.
All email services — even the biggest ones — have these restrictions so that the email service as a whole can still be useful to the people that use it. If we don’t stop these kinds of emails from going out, the recipients’ mail servers will stop them from coming in.
We desperately want to remind you yet again — we know, it sounds like a recording — about email scams, and in particular “phishing” scams. These scams happen. They happen to you. They happen to our clients. 2022 was a record year for our clients, and not a record to be proud of. Just among the clients we know of, over US$100 000 was lost as a result of phishing scams. This is shocking; this is heartbreaking. It doesn’t need to happen.
Treat every email you receive — even this one! — with suspicion. Rather than looking for signs that an email might be a scam, just assume it is! Then look for the signs that it isn’t a scam. Instead of memorising an interminable list of things to look for that show an email is a scam, instead simply ask the message to prove to you that it really is from the person who claims to have sent it, and that the request it contains is legitimate. Did NinerNet really just send you the email you received that is asking you to verify your email password, or upgrade to some service that we don’t even offer? No, we didn’t send that email. We just don’t send emails like that, and neither does any other mail provider … or bank, or life insurance company, or …. Almost nobody sends a legitimate email claiming that you have to pay an invoice in a different way to how you’ve been paying that company for years! Yes, your suppliers do change banks occasionally, but if they do they will give you plenty of notice, not send you a frightening message out of the blue demanding that you send them money to a different destination or have your service cancelled. It just doesn’t happen like that in the real business world. THINK! BE SUSPICIOUS!
You should learn more about email scams and phishing. Read these links:
If you have any questions about any of the above, please do let us know. Thank-you.
We will have one more email for you before the end of the year, with information we’re excited about because we hope it will improve our email infrastructure in 2023. We hope you’ll like it too.
Based on the current value of the Zambian kwacha in US dollars and recent trends, we are decreasing our retail kwacha prices effective today and until the next quarterly review by about 8%.
Some sample rates:
Our new kwacha rates will be online within 24 hours.
It is becoming more and more common, once an email account has been compromised by a computer virus or other malware, for the email account in question to be accessed through the webmail. When this happens, one or all of three things (and sometimes more) happen:
While all are very negative and need to be stopped quickly — and this is why a compromised email account’s password must be changed, and the old password never used again — the last is particularly insidious as you might not use the filters, or you may not even know that they exist! Filters are a legitimate tool for people to use to handle some email in an automated fashion, and they have been around as long as email has been around.
The bottom line is that a compromised email account is a very serous matter. Your machines and devices need to be protected, by security software (anti-virus software, firewalls, encryption, anti-malware software, etc.), physically (access control, passwords, physical locks, etc.), and with education, knowledge and vigilance. If an email account is compromised the reason should be determined and the cause fixed or addressed in some other way. You then also need to examine the (now formerly) compromised account; one of the first things you should check is the integrity of the account’s filters. If unauthorised filters remain in place, the account is still compromised.
It is vital that you not gloss over an email account compromise as a “cost of doing business” and just carry on as usual after the inconvenience in your day. If you do not take all of the above steps your lack of action will come back to bite you in the buttocks, as Forrest Gump said. And this bite could cost your business in money, goodwill and business.
Another thing to consider is that the mail server’s control panel allows its users to designate any email account as a “domain admin”. We have always discouraged this, instead creating dedicated accounts for domain admins, but it’s a popular and widely used feature. However, consider this: If you designate bob@example.com as a “domain admin”, and Bob’s account is compromised, then the criminal behind the compromise will have access to all of the email accounts on the example.com domain. The results could be significantly more than just the inconvenience of having one email account compromised.
Something else for you to consider is how you can protect your employees from phishing emails. (Please see our “scams” section for many examples of scam emails, many of which are phishing emails.) Phishing emails try to get their recipients to click a link where they are asked to enter their email address and email password. Of course, none of us would be fooled by this, but many people a day are. How the page where people are asked to enter their log-in information looks depends on the nature of the email. If it was allegedly from a bank, the log-in page will be an exact copy of the log-in page for the bank they’re trying to present themselves as. If they’re trying to get your email password, everything will look like a webmail log-in page. It’s convincing. When you enter your log-in information, either nothing will happen, or your browser will be redirected to a legitimate webmail log-in page, but you won’t (of course) be logged in. In the meantime, your log-in information will be saved, and available for the scammer to use.
If this happens to you, you must immediately change the password on your account.
But back to the original question: How can you protect your company from your employees potentially falling for this phishing scam? One way is to not give your employees their email passwords. If they don’t have it, they can’t enter it in a phishing form. Of course, you need to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of this. A disadvantage is that you or your IT person will have to enter it for them when setting up their email account on their machine and/or phone, but the advantage is that they won’t be able to make the mistake of inadvertently providing their password.
If you haven’t recently, it’s probably a good idea to check the filters in your webmail account right now to confirm that you put them all there and that you still need them. And while you’re at it, change your email password too! Make sure it’s at least 12 characters long, includes upper- and lower-case letters, numbers and special characters. And use a password manager too. We use and strongly recommend KeePass.
We’ve posted countless times now about this, and really, this is likely to be the last time. Shaw’s email filtering sub-contractor continues to block legitimate email from NinerNet servers. This legitimate email includes messages from banks, universities and the like. We’re not talking about spam here, but legitimate financial and business email.
As we’ve said before, we strongly advise that you do not use automatic forwarding of all messages. There are actually very few, limited circumstances under which this is necessary. If you’re not clear on why, please contact us to ask and we’ll be happy to discuss this with you. There may be something related to email you’re not fully understanding.
In other Shaw-related news, NinerNet was not affected by the Rogers outage last month. This is Shaw-related because Rogers will very likely be taking over Shaw, which means that future Rogers outages will be spread, like a virus, to the Shaw system too. Thankfully, none of NinerNet’s systems rely on Shaw or Rogers at all. This is a design choice that we made long ago.
Based on the current value of the Zambian kwacha in US dollars and recent trends, we are decreasing our retail kwacha prices effective today and until the next quarterly review by about 3%.
Some sample rates:
Our new kwacha rates will be online within 24 hours.
Based on the current value of the Zambian kwacha in US dollars and recent trends, we are increasing our retail kwacha prices effective today and until the next quarterly review by about 6%.
Some sample rates:
Our new kwacha rates will be online within 24 hours.
In the last 48 hours we have seen a significant increase in the number of email accounts that have been compromised due to the virus infection of a large number of our clients’ machines and/or devices. In one case that we know of, one of our resellers stated that they “have a company wide nightmare [of] machines spamming each other and everyone they have ever talked to via email.” This is not good. They have been working with their client to get a handle on this, and as of Tuesday their time this issue seems to be under control for them.
However, since then we have had multiple other email accounts compromised on multiple domains. Please note that email accounts are “compromised” when the machine or device on which the account is configured is infected with a virus. This is not under the control of NinerNet, but you and your employees and colleagues. Please ensure that you have updated anti-virus programs or apps installed, and please do not open attachments from unknown senders. Even attachments from known senders must be treated with extreme care, because viruses tend to come from other infected machines, and they could be the machines or devices of people you know.
Some reminders for all clients:
At this point it looks like we nipped these outbreaks in the bud, so our mail servers are not in any additional blacklists. However, please do contact NinerNet support if you have any issues with outgoing email, or if you have any questions.
Thank-you.
Based on the current value of the Zambian kwacha in US dollars and recent trends, we are maintaining our retail kwacha prices until the next quarterly review.
Some sample rates:
Our kwacha rates are available on our website.
Based on the current value of the Zambian kwacha in US dollars and recent trends, we are excited to announce that we are lowering our retail kwacha prices (for the first time since 2017) effective today and until the next quarterly review by 26%!
Some sample rates:
Our new kwacha rates will be online within 24 hours.
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