Corporate Blog

Recent scam/phishing message(s)

17 May 2024 07:43:56 +0000

Please be advised that there is a phishing message getting through the spam filters with the subject:

Oops, Error updating the POP/IMAP server of YOUR-DOMAIN.TLD

In the actual email, “YOUR-DOMAIN.TLD” just happens to be the domain of the email address to which the scam was sent (see screenshot below). (What a coincidence!) These are not sent by NinerNet, as even a cursory look at the “From” field will show. We also do not use folksy words like “Oops” in business and technical emails, and we don’t pose as the “webmaster” of your domain. We are NinerNet, and that is how we always present ourselves to you, our client.

If you click the button to “Update Preferences” (or whatever action your copy of the message urges you to take) — which we strongly urge you not to do! — you will be taken to a page that looks like the log-in page for a webmail system (not our webmail system, I hasten to emphasise!), where the scammers expect that you will enter your email log-in information. Your log-in will fail, of course, but you will have given your real email password to the scammer, who will then use it to hijack your account.

If you or someone in your organisation falls for this, change the password for that account immediately! It’s not shameful to fall for a scam; many are convincing and we are all busy people who sometimes do something we regret when we are busy and distracted. What is important is that you recognise what has happened and take action to prevent any further damage.

Please be aware of and do not fall for these types of messages! The spam filter has been catching a lot of these types of messages lately, but the casual language of this one seems to be defeating our spam filters.

Please ensure that your employees, colleagues and other associates know about these scam messages. You should also remind yourself and your employees, colleagues and associates of the information on our website at the following links:

Thank-you for your time and attention to this vitally important matter. Please contact NinerNet if you have any questions.

Phishing scam email, 2024-05-16.

Tags: scams, spam
Categories: Warnings
Comments Off

Adventures in blocking spam

7 May 2024 06:42:30 +0000

As we’ve said outright and intimated over the years, the battle against spam is never-ending.

One thing we have noticed in the last year or so is that a huge amount of spam comes from certain TLDs (top-level domains), but blocking entire TLDs is a bit radical. We have generally avoided doing so, but the time has come to block the following two alternative TLDs:

sa.com, and
za.com

These are simply two regular domains, but they are owned by CentralNIC (now “Team Internet” because they can’t make up their minds about how they want to be known) who market them as TLDs — just as NinerNet markets the zam.co domain as an alternative TLD (actually, SLD, second-level domain) for Zambia. Therefore, you can buy the sub-domain your-name.sa.com and your-name.za.com. CentralNIC doesn’t seem to make even a cursory attempt to stop spammers from using their domains to spam, so we now block all messages sent from all addresses on those two “pseudo” TLDs — e.g., spammer1@spammer1.sa.com and spammer2@spammer2.za.com. We’re considering blocking the .top TLD as well, for the same reason, but we haven’t yet. You can certainly block entire TLDs from reaching your email addresses as well, if you feel this rather extreme move will benefit your domain.

If you happen to correspond with a legitimate correspondent on one of those alternative TLDs, please contact NinerNet support and we will work with you to address the problem you will now have communicating with them.

Thanks for your attention to this matter.

Tags: domains, email, scams, spam
Categories: Notices
Comments Off

Why do I get so much spam?

14 February 2024 12:55:34 +0000

NinerNet hosts email. The one thing that this guarantees us is to receive complaints about spam. Unfortunately, we’re not a monolith like Google, so we need to reply to these. Try sending an email to support@gmail.com and see what you get. Silence.

So the point of this post is to try and help people understand why they get spam at all. This has nothing to do with your email hosting provider. Well, I can certainly guarantee that NinerNet is not selling your email address(es) to the spammers, otherwise we’d be rich! But we don’t need to sell your email address. If you create the email address your-common-first-name@your-domain-that-is-publicly-known.tld, bingo, the spammers have your email address. What about that support address above? That’s what’s called an RFC 2142 address. RFC 2142 (“Mailbox Names for Common Services, Roles and Functions”) outlines a list of email addresses that are supposed to exist on every domain, and one of them is support@. They are:

abuse@
ftp@
hostmaster@
info@
list@
list-request@
marketing@
news@
noc@
postmaster@
sales@
security@
support@
usenet@
uucp@
webmaster@
www@

You probably have one or more of those addresses on your domain. Congratulations! You’ve just painted a target on your back, or maybe seventeen of them to be precise.

Other ways spammers get your email address:

Websites: Don’t post your email address on the Web! Even on your own website. There are crawlers/spiders automatically collecting those addresses every minute of every day. If you post your email address on your own website, it will receive spam within days, maybe even hours!
Unscrupulous suppliers: This has always been a bugbear. Of course, if your supplier happens to have millions of customers, it would be tempting for them to sell your email addresses. Some disguise this as “sharing your information with trusted partner organisations”. Of course, their definition of “sharing” has a dollar figure attached to it, dollars they will never “share” with you.
Crackers: Ever had a virus on your computer? Your email address and the email addresses of all of your correspondents are probably not the only thing you’ve handed over.
Friends: You know that idiot friend or relative of yours that sends out joke emails with hundreds of email address in the “to” and “cc” fields? Yup, thanks Aunty Betty / Uncle Bobby.
Forwarding: This is one the things that has driven me crazy since the 20th century! It’s bad enough that your friend/relative has sent you the world’s funniest email joke in the history of humanity, but they copied it to a thousand of their closest friends and relatives by putting their email addresses — including yours! — in the “to” and/or “cc” fields so that everyone can see them! And then, to show how ignorant some of their friends and relatives are, some of them forwarded the same email with all of those addresses still exposed in the body of the message. Those email addresses are all then exposed to whatever malware comes along on any of the hundred or thousands of computers on which those emails are stored. But it’s not just ignorant friends and relatives that do this; I’ve seen supposedly professional IT people do this in professional, business emails!
Hacked databases: Related to the “unscrupulous suppliers” point above is the fact that the databases of said suppliers are hacked all the time.
WHOIS: If you’ve registered a domain, the domain registry likely has your email address in a publicly-accessible database called the WHOIS (“‘Who is’ the owner of this domain?”). Thankfully, when the GDPR was implemented in the European Union in 2018, the biggest registries in the world — the ones that run the gTLDs (generic top-level domains) — were forced to take their heads out of their nether regions and stop publishing that information. But sadly, some ccTLD registries still have their heads planted firmly where they’ve always been (can anyone say dot-zm?) and they still make this information freely available to spammers scraping the WHOIS, despite their feeble disclaimers.
Viruses and other malware: If one of your contacts’ machines or devices are compromised by a virus, one of the purposes of that virus is probably to spam you, or send copies of the virus to you.
Subscriptions: If someone is trying to get your email address for their newsletter, maybe they also want it to sell it.
E-cards: Awww, it’s so lovely to send your valentine (or wannabe valentine) a valentine “e-card” … or Christmas card, or birthday card, or …. You probably didn’t ask for their consent first though, so you’ve essentially just screwed (and not in the way you or your valentine want to on Valentine’s Day!) your valentine’s email address for the rest of his/her life, or the life of that email address.
Signing up for stuff: Whether it’s a free report or white paper or signing up for a class at a local community centre, you lose control of your email address the moment you give it out to anyone. Some websites exist simply for the purpose of collecting email addresses in this way, a cute, shiny bauble for your email address. Are you really going to read their hundreds of pages of terms and conditions to realise how your email address (and you) are going to be abused? Didn’t think so.
Phishing: Phishing emails essentially just try to trick you into doing something you normally wouldn’t do. Of course, they already have your email address from any of the methods listed here, but they want more than just your email address, and perhaps what they want are the email addresses of all of your contacts. Often they can get these if somehow you give them to them (LinkedIn) or they can get if you give them the password to your email account where you might have them saved.
Plug-ins and apps: Be very careful of plug-ins and apps that may be copying all of your contacts and sending them to whoever is controlling the app or plug-in. Be especially careful of apps and various social media websites (such as LinkedIn) that helpfully offer to send invitations to your contacts! We mention LinkedIn in this regard especially, for these three reasons:
- Use of e-mail accounts of members for spam sending,
- Perkins lawsuit (related to the above), and
- Moving emails to LinkedIn servers.
Brute force: Besides the technique mentioned where spammers send to a list of common names on all domains, they can simply send to a@example.com, b@example.com and so on, and then start again at aa@example.com, ab@example.com and so on. The terms “brute force” and “dictionary attack” apply here.
Buying it: The other side of any of the above transactions happens when anyone who has obtained your address by one of the methods above sells it to willing buyers. You yourself have probably been spammed by people offering to sell you lists of email addresses, all of which would have been acquired by one or more of the techniques above.

If even one of the above applies to you, you have signed the warrant to have your email address spammed, but chances are that you have committed several of the above, compounding the problem. Again, it’s not your email provider’s fault that you get so much spam.

How can I receive less spam?

Two VERY effective ways to avoid spam are to use “supplier addresses” and rotating temporary email addresses. Let me explain both:

Supplier addresses: For many years I’ve operated a system of what I call “supplier addresses”. If I’m dealing with Twitter, for example — not that I use their name because they were mentioned in recent news about a data leak — I create the email address “twitter@mydomain.com”, and I only give that address to Twitter, nobody else. (Actually, don’t create a new email address, just create a free alias for the email address that will receive email from that supplier.) Yes, I have the email address my-common-first-name@mydomain.com, but the only people who get that email address are my family, friends and existing clients. Nobody else on the planet gets that address, and I certainly don’t enter it into a form field on a web page and I don’t post it on the Web! So if Twitter (in this example) sells my email address or is hacked, I know exactly who let my email address into the wild. To be frank, that hasn’t happened to me many times, but I quickly realised that it does happen, so the email aliases I create now all include a number (e.g., twitter123@mydomain.com). If the email address is compromised I just change the number and inform Twitter by changing it in my account with them and kill the old alias. My numbering follows a system, but you can make your own rules.
Rotating temporary email addresses: I link above to the service that NinerNet provides, but at this point it’s a very limited, non-automated service with very few customers. However, it’s not rocket science and you can do it yourself on your own domain. For example, if your primary address is bob@yourdomain.com, create a free alias for this month called “bob2402@yourdomain.com” on that address. I also create one for last month and one for next month, to ensure continuity when the month changes over. (The numbers in this example are obviously two digits for each of the year and the month.) Now you can give out the temporary alias to whoever you want with no concern at all about being spammed. Want to download that “free” white paper? Give them your temporary alias secure in the knowledge that when (not if) they start spamming you it will probably be after that email ceases to exist. Then at the beginning of next month, just delete one alias and create the next. In February I will have an alias for last month (2401), this month (2402), and next month (2403). On 1 March I will delete the January alias and create the April (2404) alias. If you have a contact form on your website for new customers to contact you, reply from this month’s temporary alias until they become a new client. At that point you obviously have to throw caution to the wind and start using your “real” email address, but you’ve already done a lot to hugely reduce the amount of spam you will receive from not following any precautions at all.

With a little imagination — but feel free to contact NinerNet if you need help — you can apply the above principles to all of the email addresses in your company, whether it’s just you or you have a thousand employees. They will drastically reduce the amount of spam you and your employees receive, before your email service provider’s anti-spam system even kicks in.

They key point here is that you need to practise “email hygiene”. How is your email hygiene?

Tags: email, phishing, rotating temporary email, scams, spam
Categories: Notices
Comments Off

Email restrictions reminder, Phishing

13 December 2022 05:00:02 +0000

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.

Sending limits

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:

If you regularly want to send that many emails we strongly recommend that you use a company such as Mailchimp.
If you have a one-time need to send a lot of emails, break your list up into groups of 300 (or just under 300) and send that many a day.

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. 🙂

Sending restrictions

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.

Phishing

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:

NinerNet blog on Scams
NinerNet blog on Spam
Wikipedia on Phishing
Man-in-the-middle attack
- This attack was used to steal about US$50 000 from one of our clients and their clients.

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.

Tags: email, email sending limits, email sending restrictions, phishing, scams, spam
Categories: Notices
Comments Off

Yet another note about scam emails

19 May 2021 07:36:15 +0000

Phishing scam email, 2021-05-12.

The scam and phishing emails continue to come in. The most recent example is particularly aggressive. Please do not fall for it.

NinerNet would never send out an email this aggressive or threatening.

Please review our last two blog posts about these kinds of emails. They are all 100% scams.

Another one of these emails had this “from” field:

From: Domain@nc036.ninernet.net, Admin@nc036.ninernet.net

The footer of the emails also contains a note that states, “example.com Webmail Support”, where “example.com” is the domain in the recipient’s email address. This is all automated, and doesn’t make it any more legitimate.

If you have any questions or concerns, please do contact NinerNet support. Thank-you.

Tags: scams, security, spam
Categories: Warnings
Comments Off

Warning about sexual blackmail/extortion scam emails

13 April 2021 09:32:21 +0000

We have, in the past, warned of sexual extortion and blackmail emails. These reared their ugly heads in 2018, and have continued to circulate in various forms since. I have received them myself, and they are unnerving.

Today we warn you again, but with added urgency because we know of someone who has fallen for this scam. This is not unusual, because people fall prey to these scammers every day, but it is even more saddening when it’s someone you know.

Here is the email they fell for:

From: KJi
Sent: April 05, 2021 1:23 AM
To: Recipients
Subject: Evidences Against You

Hello,

It’s so shameful how people can’t be satisfied with their marriages.

We know you are cheating on your spouse and this has been backed-up with
evidences from your hacked mobile device for your fyi.

Just a little favor from you to me can go along way in esnuring things don’t
get bitter with your spouse finding out.

Kindly send an equivalent of 1200$ worth of bitcoin to this wallet
:bc1qt9fx8fz2fydy0q5h0ruvd30a7ujqxmx80hn3tn

Trust me, this is very little compared to what will happen if you don’t
cooporate with us and i believe you love your family no matter what.

In 48hrs time,if we don’t receive this token of 1200$ worth of btc from you,
you will receive pictures and screenshots via email and same will be sent to
your spouse as well.

Your time start counting now and note that any attempt to file a complaint
will not result to nohing as this e-mail cannot be traced and same as my
bitcoin id.

If, by any chance I find out that you have shared this message with anyone
else, I will make things go viral immediately

Rdgs,

KJ

Note all the spelling, grammatical and punctuation errors.

There is no way for this person to get their money back, as there is no way to find the scammer. And it is a scam; the sender does not have any “evidences”. It’s a shot in the dark, and the chances of their mass email finding someone who really is being unfaithful in their marriage — and are feeling guilty and don’t want to be outed — are actually pretty good!

Please take this warning seriously, and don’t be fooled by these emails. They are just scams. We strongly suggest that you circulate this information to your colleagues, co-workers, employees, family and friends. Knowledge is power against the scammers.

Tags: scams
Categories: Warnings
Comments Off

Compendium of scam emails

13 April 2021 09:26:41 +0000

Scam and “phishing” emails arrive daily by the truck load. We can’t send a warning every time we ourselves get a scam or phishing email. If we did, our own emails would become just noise in the background.

However, we present here eighteen screenshots of scam, spam and phishing emails that we have received or seen over the last four years. If you’re not sure what one of these emails look like, we encourage you to look these over. The approaches vary, but here are some common factors:

They advise you that your email account is over quota, and you must take some immediate action to prevent catastrophe — i.e., the loss of all your email.
Your email account is being closed or upgraded.
The webmail for your account is being upgraded, and you have to take action.
Your domain is being cancelled or expired within a few hours or a couple of days.
Payment for the renewal of your domain is overdue.
Wordy expiration notices that are unclear about what exactly is expiring and how it could theoretically affect you.
Domain SEO (search engine optimisation) notices made up to look like invoices for domain renewal.
Emails with links that disguise the true destination to which you are clicking. Always check the status bar in your email program or app — before you click, while hovering your mouse pointer over the link — to determine whether or not your browser will really be going to a domain you recognise — e.g., niner.net if you are a NinerNet Communications client.
Emails that try to sound like they come from your own company’s IT department, complete with copyright notices.
“Final” renewal notices that are a surprise.
Fine print at the end of the email that makes ludicrous statements that contradict the meat of the email, such as, “We do not directly register or renew domain names” or “THIS IS NOT A BILL” (in an email that looks like it’s a bill to renew your domain); “We have clearly mentioned the source mail-id of this email, also clearly mentioned our subject lines and they are in no way misleading” (in an email that tries to mislead you into paying what looks like an invoice).
Urgent server warnings, that aren’t urgent server warnings at all.

NinerNet Communications is judicious about how many emails we send out, and how often we do. We’re also careful to ensure that we use proper spelling and grammar. Our emails do not contain copyright notices and pages of meaningless legal notices. (Maybe they should, but currently they don’t. We’re real people who tend to believe that our clients are also real people with brains.) With that in mind, here is a non-exhaustive list of things you should look for to determine if an email you’ve received really is from NinerNet and if it’s legitimate:

Is it from an email address on the niner.net domain? (Configure your email program or app to show you the sender’s actual email address, not just their name.) If it’s not, it’s not from us and you can probably ignore it if it claims to be about your hosting or domain.
Does it try to scare you or make you angry, such that you might take immediate action? If it does, it’s definitely not from us.
Is it in HTML or “rich text”, with different colours and types of fonts, and does it contain images or things that look like buttons (especially that say “secure online payment”)? It’s very likely not from us.
Are there copyright notices in the email? Definitely not from us.
Does it flatter you with words such as “esteemed” or “valued”? Not from us. (You are esteemed and valued, for sure; we just don’t lay it on thick with you!)
Does the email address you by the name in your email address? For example, if your email address is accounts@example.com, does it address you as “accounts” as if that was your name? Not from us.
Does it ask for personal information or ask you to update or confirm personal information? Very likely not from us unless you’re a brand new client.
Look very carefully at the sender’s address. Does the font on your email program make some letters look like others? For example, if the sender looks like bob@example.com, are you sure his domain isn’t exarnple.com? With some fonts the “r” and the “n” together look like the “m” in “example”.

Of course, the above checklist can be applied to any email you receive, including emails that purport to be from your bank.

Attachments: Don’t open attachments from unknown senders or that you are not expecting, even from known senders. Also make sure you have anti-virus software installed.

Our automated notices telling you that your mail box is full, or close to it, are extremely brief and do not try to scare you or offer you links to “free upgrades” or anything like that.

If you click on a link in an email and enter information on a form — especially a password — and then realise that it’s a scam/phishing, immediately change that password. You should also contact NinerNet, or whoever that account is with, to inform them what has happened.

Finally, when we do send you an email to advise you of something that applies to all (or most) clients — such as server moves, upgrades, etc. — we include a link to our blog (blog.niner.net) so that you can confirm that information.

Below, then, are the eighteen screenshots of scam, spam and phishing emails. The first is particularly noteworthy, as it is a sexual blackmail/extortion scam that seeks payment via Bitcoin. It and similar emails will be the subject of our next blog post.

If you have any questions, please contact NinerNet support. Thank-you.

Sexual blackmail bitcoin email scam.

: Urgent server warning email scam.

: Mailbox over storage revalidation email scam.

: Mailbox is full email scam.

: Using old version email scam.

: Important domain seo notification email scam.

: Domain service cancellation scam.

: Upgrade account email scam.

: Secure online payment email scam.

: Domain service cancellation scam.

: Domain danger suspended scam.

: Pending unread messages email scam.

: Notice of final renewal domain scam.

: Domain cancellation notice scam.

: Closing old versions email scam.

: Mailbox upgrade quota email scam.

: New version webmail email scam.

: Check pending incoming email scam.

Tags: domain renewals, scams
Categories: Warnings
Comments Off

A couple of issues today

27 January 2021 10:28:08 +0000

We, as well as some clients today, have received phishing emails advising the recipients to follow a link to deal with emails that have been quarantined or “suspended” on the mail server. These emails are scams, and do not come from addresses on the niner.net domain. Do not click on the links, and delete the emails.

Secondly, we are aware that the primary mail server’s IP address is in at least one new blacklist as a result of our data centre being blacklisted. If email you send is bounced for this reason, please advise us and we will re-route email to that domain via one of our relay servers.

Please contact NinerNet support if you have any questions or need to report something. Thank-you.

Tags: email, scams, spam
Categories: Notices
Comments Off

Business during the COVID-19 pandemic

19 March 2020 02:54:52 +0000

We know that some of you are no doubt weary of COVID-19 (coronavirus) news updates, but we’re prompted to make this brief statement.

NinerNet‘s operations are not currently, nor forecast to be, affected by this pandemic. We do have business continuity plans, but at this point they have not needed to be activated beyond following public health guidelines and directives. We have had communications from some (but not all) suppliers that they are implementing contingency plans to ensure the continuity of their own businesses, and therefore we do not anticipate we or you (our clients) will be adversely affected.

It’s important to remember that the vast majority of the relatively small numbers of people who have been affected so far have recovered. This means life will no doubt carry on as usual in the near future.

In the meantime though, as the operators of a service on which you rely for information communication, we want to remind you that the scammers and spammers never rest — in fact, through our spam filtering we know they are already at work, attempting to take advantage of fear. If you receive any email about the pandemic — offering rumours, cures, masks, hand sanitiser or even (in some parts of the world) toilet paper! — they are best ignored.

We very much appreciate your business. We hope you are staying safe and healthy, and we look forward to continuing to serve you for many years to come. If we can help you or your business in some way during this time, please do tell us how.

Here are some links that may help you get some factual information from your governmental health authorities:

Thank-you, and stay well.

Craig

Tags: emergency, governmental advice, health, scams, spam, transparency
Categories: Notices
Comments Off

Scammers never sleep

31 December 2018 10:02:41 +0000

If you thought you could get a break from scammers over Christmas, think again. This one landed in our in box on Christmas day, as is clear from the date the countdown starts!

From: greatroadnorth.com is about to expire. <no-replay@renewal-service.info>
Reply-to: “greatroadnorth.com is about to expire.” <no-replay@renewal-service.info>
Subject: Domain Administrator
Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2018 17:52:19 +0000
Return-path: <01020167e67ef75e-d5d2ee16-fd2f-457e-9a8d-00dba3dc6492-000000@eu-west-1.amazonses.com>
X-spam-score: 2.125

Tucows Domains Inc.
====================
IMPORTANT NOTIFICATION
====================
greatroadnorth.com
Date: 2018-12-25

Dear Domain Administrator,

The Domain SEO-listing shown below are set for renewal and need to be processed in the next 48 hours.

No need to worry, please go to this link and follow the instructions:
renewal-service.info/greatroadnorth.com

Your product details are listed below:
====================

Product Name:
SEO-Renewal for greatroadnorth.com
Expire Time:
48 hours from 2018-12-25
Renewal cost per annum:
$69.00

====================
Amount due: $69.00

PAYMENT INFORMATION
Information on how to renew your domain can be found here:
renewal-service.info/greatroadnorth.com

This offer is only valid for 48 hours as a courtesy to let you know that your domain is expiring soon and this search engine optimization offer will expire.
Should your domain name expire, there is going to be a signifcant drop
in search engine services for your website, email and any other associated services.
This domain seo registration for greatroadnorth.com limited time offer will end in 48 hours from 2018-12-25.

Thank you!

Sincerely,
Renewal department

====================

Note:
You received this message because you elected to receive notification offers. Should you no longer wish to receive our offers, please unsubscribe here. If you have multiple accounts with us, you must opt out for each one individually.

Some characteristics of this spam/scam:

Your name (available from the WHOIS) will be in the subject, along with a flag emoji to draw attention to the email.
The name of your legitimate domain registrar (also available from the WHOIS) will be at the top of the email, even though they did not send the email.
There is the usual very close deadline (48 hours), after which the world will end for you and your domain.
The plain-looking links in the email mask tracking links to the domain wizz.netvalue.io.
The scammer makes the unusual claim that not sending them money will cause “a signifcant [sic] drop in search engine services for your … email”. This, of course, is absolutely false, as your email traffic is not tied directly to search engine traffic anyway.
Sent through the best and biggest “bulletproof” spam hosting service in the world: Amazon.

Given the fact that most gTLD registrars (including the ones we use) have not pubished WHOIS information since May 2018, these scams are being sent to old mailing lists compiled before publishing stopped, and are out of date. (For example, the domain that is the subject of this email no longer exists.) Changing the contact email address on your domain and shutting down the old address is something you should consider doing.

Tags: scams, spam
Categories: Warnings
Comments Off