Corporate Blog

Crowdstrike incident: Client update

20 July 2024 13:24:51 +0000

After a very trying day for many customers around the world that use Microsoft Windows or rely on companies that use Microsoft Windows — like Hotmail/Outlook.com, Office 365, Google Cloud / Compute Engine, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, etc., etc., etc. — we would like to take this opportunity to ensure that our clientele know that we were wholly unaffected by the worldwide chaos.

Is this blog post an opportunistic jab at people who rely on an operating system and company that was late to realise the potential of the Internet? Yes, of course. Why? Well, just look at the trouble that Microsoft gave us last month, and are still giving us today. Microsoft are not our favourite people these days, even though Microsoft themselves weren’t responsible for the Crowdstrike failure.

Hey, we get it, shi … stuff happens. Our status blog currently shows 207 posts in the “incidents” category since 2009. Of course, that’s not 207 failures; at the very most it’s 104 failures if you assume a post announcing an incident and a second announcing it’s over, but in reality some incidents had multiple posts and some posts were only to alert clients to issues with other companies. I’d say that there were far fewer than 100 incidents in fifteen years; feel free to do the maths and check our live uptime monitor for yourself. But one does wonder how an update was pushed out by Crowdstrike without it being tested. That’s just unfathomable. On the other hand, NinerNet doesn’t check every single update we apply to our servers, but we have to rely on our operating system vendors to do that for us. As Crowdstrike customers and their customers found out yesterday, the IT world is very interdependent.

Of course, NinerNet will almost certainly have some major incident in the future, and I know that some will then say that this post will come back to bite us in the ass. Not really. I’m always amused when an incident happens and people say or claim, “We will learn and it will never happen again!” That cracks me up. Incidents — whether they are global IT meltdowns or plane crashes — are almost always human-caused. So yeah, it will happen again, and NinerNet will have some issue at some time in the future and we will learn from it and promise that we will take steps to prevent it from happening again. But we have never and will never claim that it will never happen again.

The other purpose of this post is for marketing. The word “marketing” is a four-letter word to me, simply because about the only skill that marketers have is the ability to lie, with a straight face. I certainly wouldn’t accuse Microsoft or Crowdstrike of any kind of over-marketing or marketing subterfuge but, you know, there’s a part of me that looks askance at claims made by companies that over-promise and under-deliver … and over-promising and under-delivering are pretty much the meat and potatoes of marketers! It is far beyond my remit to determine whether or not either Microsoft or Crowdstrike have ever over-promised or under-delivered, but yesterday under-delivery was rampant.

Update, 2024-07-24: I wasn’t planning to drive home any of my points above, but I was cleaning up some open browser tabs and there were a few Crowdstrike-related tabs still open.

At “Helping our customers through the CrowdStrike outage” Microsoft proudly states, “We currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than one percent of all Windows machines.” Umm, so? Your point is? What they fail to state here is that those 8.5 million Windows devices affected many, many more millions (a billion?) of poor saps who rely on companies that rely on Crowdstrike that relies on Microsoft’s crappy operating system. It reminds me of a saying: “Figures don’t lie, but liars sure as hell can figure!”.

George Kurtz, CEO of Crowdstrike, also stated in a tweet, “Today was not a security or cyber incident. Our customers remain fully protected.” This statement is freaking hilarious! If you can’t turn on your “Windows device”, of course it’s “fully protected”! OMG, this is one for the comedy annals!

Browsing through Mr. Kurtz’s Twitter feed you see a lot of the aforementioned “marketing”:

* Wow… another great quarter in the books for $CRWD.
* $CRWD delivered a strong 2Q23 with record $218M net new ARR, $2.14B ending ARR, record net new customers & $136M free cash flow.
* $CRWD delivered record Q4 results.

*yawn*

Tags: down time, reputation, security
Categories: Interest, Warnings
Comments Off

Compromised email accounts are being accessed via webmail

29 August 2022 11:01:18 +0000

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:

The criminal behind the virus/malware uses your webmail account to send spam or more viruses (the viruses will be stopped by our server though, but sometimes some spam will still get through),
The criminal poses as you (or one of your employees) and dupes your customers into sending payments to their bank account(s), and/or
The criminal creates filters in your email account to siphon off email to external email accounts they or their associates control.

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.

Tags: compromise, control panel, domain admin, email filtering, encryption, fraud, malware, password, security, spam, viruses, webmail
Categories: Updated posts, Warnings
Comments Off

Significant recent spam activity

16 March 2022 02:30:11 +0000

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:

Please ensure you have anti-virus software (or an app) installed on all machines (computers) and devices (phones/tablets),
Please only open attachments after they have been scanned for viruses,
Please be extra careful of attachments sent from unknown senders, and
NinerNet’s mail server scans incoming and outgoing messages for viruses, but if the vendor of the software isn’t aware of the existence of the virus it may get through. If you also have anti-virus software installed, then that additional scan could make the difference between a normal day and an expensive day you’d rather forget.

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.

Tags: email, reputation, security, spam
Categories: Notices, Warnings
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

Spam and virus filtering on the mail server

11 October 2018 15:15:22 +0000

Over the last five months we’ve been monitoring the effectiveness of the anti-spam systems on server NC036 with a view to setting the point at which emails are considered by the system to be spam. We have slowly lowered the cut-off point from the default of 6.2 to 3.0, and have found that at 3.0 the rate of legitimate email caught in the filter rises sharply. Therefore we have now set the default, server-wide level at 3.5. At this point we’re blocking about one thousand to fifteen hundred spams a day, and anywhere from a handful to a few dozen viruses a month.

You can set a different cut-off point for spam to your domain(s) as follows:

Log into the mail server control panel.
Click “Domains & Accounts”.
Click the domain you want to manage.
Click “Spam Policy”.
Enter a different number in the “Classify mail as spam when score is >=” field.
Click the green “Save changes” button.

In short, the lower you set the score the more spam is caught, but the greater the likelihood of legitimate email being classified as spam. Conversely, the higher the score you set the less spam will be caught and the lower the likelihood of legitimate email being classified as spam.

You can also manage other aspects of the spam filter on this page, but we recommend that you do not. The server-wide defaults are to enable all four checks (spam, virus, bad headers and banned files) and to quarantine spam and viruses. If you want to allow any of those four classes of undesirable emails through on your domain that’s your call, but you take full responsibility for the results. The results include everything from annoyance to compromised machines, devices and accounts. NinerNet does charge for time spent recovering and cleaning up compromised accounts.

Please note that the spam and virus filters monitor both incoming and outgoing email.

We strongly recommend, now that we have finished our evaluation, that you conduct your own evaluation of the situation with undesirable email on your own domain or domains. Once logged into the mail server control panel, please navigate to System -> Quarantined Mails. There you will find spam and virus emails to and from your domain(s) for approximately the last week. As mentioned above, if you find that too many legitimate emails are being classified as spam, you have two options: 1) Increase the score at which messages are considered spam, and/or 2) Whitelist any legitimate senders or domains that consistently receive high scores. To whitelist a “sender” (a single email address) or a domain or a domain and all of its sub-domains, follow these instructions:

Log into the mail server control panel.
Click “Domains & Accounts”.
Click the domain you want to manage.
Click “White/Blacklist”.
Follow the instructions on the right of the page to add records to the appropriate whitelist, incoming or outgoing.

Please note that it might be tempting to add something like @yourdomain.com to the outgoing whitelist (thereby whitelisting all addresses on your domain), but we strongly advise you not to. If you do, and a machine on your network is infected with a virus or is compromised and starts spamming, the system will follow your instructions and let it all through. Please see above about our fees for cleaning up after a mess like this. The emails will likely be blocked on the receiving server anyway, and your domain possibly blacklisted. You don’t want you domain (or our mail server) blacklisted, so not whitelisting all of your users is a defence against getting your domain (and our mail server) blacklisted.

Something else to note is that it’s fairly pointless to blacklist spammers and virus senders. If you blacklist bob@example.com because he sent a virus that the virus scanner caught, you’ll also block the legitimate email he sends once he cleans up his machine and sends you an email to apologise. Similarly, spammers rarely use the same email address or domain more than a few times, so you’ll just be filling your blacklist with a lot of crap. Of course, if a persistent spammer keeps getting through the spam filter, then go ahead and blacklist them if they’re actually using the same email address or domain.

Please monitor your quarantine on a regular basis so that you notice trends and compensate for them. With our evaluation ended we will only occasionally monitor the quarantine to make human judgement calls about letting some emails through, as we have been doing over the last five months.

It is worth noting here a couple of points. One is that no spam filter is perfect. During our evaluation we have seen spam come in that was scored less than 3.5, and so will make it through the filter now that we have settled on a cut-off of 3.5. Another is that some legitimate email from senders hosted on this server — i.e., you and your colleagues and employees — has been scored above 3.5 and so has been (or will be) quarantined instead of being delivered to the sender’s mail server. This is why you need to keep an eye on the quarantine for the domains under your account, and if necessary release legitimate emails for delivery. This is how you release emails:

Log into the mail server control panel.
Navigate to System -> Quarantined Mails.
Select the legitimate email or emails.
At the bottom of the page select “release selected” from the “Choose Action” drop-down list.
Click the green “Apply” button.

The emails will then disappear from the quarantine and will be delivered to the recipients. You may also select one of the other three “release” options if you want to release the email and add the sender to your whitelist if their email is consistently being scored highly. As mentioned above, it’s generally a waste of time to select one of the blacklisting options; there’s also no need to manually delete items from the quarantine, as they are rotated out after about a week.

With respect to your own emails being marked as spam, there are some glaring spam markers that we’ve seen commonly used that you and your colleagues and employees can avoid by following these suggestions:

Don’t use blank subjects.
Don’t use ALL CAPITALS subjects. If you do, keep in mind that your method of trying to get the recipient’s attention might fail completely if your message is blocked as spam.
Avoid using very short subjects.
Avoid using “Dear xxxx” in your salutations. Email is a less formal mode of communication than letters, and opening an email with “Dear” is a classic spam marker and will give your email enough extra points that it could push it over the cut-off score, especially when combined with other spam markers listed here.
- Update: Thanks to a client for pointing out that “Dear Bob” or “Dear Mrs. Smith” are not scored as badly as generic salutations such as “Dear sir”, “Dear madam”, “Dear investor”, “Dear home owner”, “Dear winner”, “Dear beneficiary”, “Dear friend”, “Dear you@example.com”, etc.
Don’t send blank emails with only an attachment.

Please note that we don’t read your email. This data is gleaned from the spam reports and the reasons that certain messages were blocked because they were classified as spam.

This spam filter is much better than what we had on the old email server, and now you have access to the information it contains and control over how it works. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact NinerNet support. Thank-you.

Tags: blacklist, blacklisting, email quarantine, security, spam, spam filtering, spam markers, viruses, whitelist, whitelisting
Categories: Notices, Updated posts
Comments Off

Configuring our servers against “POODLE”, SSL/TLS, and email security

24 October 2014 15:52:19 +0000

The maintenance to protect against the “POODLE” exploit has been finished, as we’ve noted on our status blog. While I’d like this to be a short post stating just that, like the maintenance itself, there is more to it than meets the eye.

What was anticipated to take about an hour during a scheduled weekend maintenance window ended up taking much longer as we waded through the pros and cons of configuring some or all services to disable SSL version 3. (Of course, very few people know about and can prepare for these things in advance.) First, there was some debate in information security circles about just how serious this issue was/is, how quickly it needed to be addressed, and by whom. In short, some took it more seriously than others, but there was general agreement that other issues (Heartbleed and Shellshock, for example) were much bigger. Those that didn’t feel it was that serious had their reasons, but we’re not in business to gamble with your security.

While this is a vulnerability in a protocol (SSL version 3) that is (or has been) used to secure different types of connections, the main area of concern was with HTTPS connections — i.e., web browsing. To my knowledge, the only known exploit of this protocol vulnerability uses JavaScript, and only over HTTPS connections. In other words, there is currently no known issue with using SSLv3 to secure non-HTTPS connections — e.g., email.

To that end SSLv3 will still work on some of our mail servers. How this is handled — if your email program can’t use TLS — differs between email programs, with some email clients failing silently and establishing a non-secure connection instead, and some failing completely to connect. We expect that most email programs using our existing suggested configurations will continue to work across all of our servers. However, while we have not had any reports of issues from clients, one of the reasons this took longer than anticipated was the surprising number of current or recent email clients that stopped working when we disabled SSLv3 on the mail servers. Connections by email clients configured to use SSLv3 still work on server NC018, while on NC027 they will fail silently as described above. This is related to the differing behaviour of the software running these two mail servers.

All web servers (including control panels) were configured to deny SSLv3 connections by Monday this week. Web browser developers seem to have kept up with and done a better job implementing TLS in current versions than some email client developers. As we’ve stated several times previously, Outlook 2003 should be relegated to the past, along with Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6. The latter uses only SSL (and has TLS disabled) by default. Microsoft, of all people, have actually had an active campaign to discourage the use of MSIE 6 since 2009 with their ie6countdown.com website; according to that website, only 3.3% of users worldwide are still using MSIE 6, and about three quarters of them are in China. Put it this way, using MSIE 6 today is like trying to drive a Model T Ford on modern roads among modern cars, expecting to go as fast as modern cars and to be serviced by modern mechanics. In short, using certain software today is simply a bad idea, even if it still appears to some people to work.

Another thing I’d like to address here is the difference between SSL (secure sockets layer) and TLS (transport layer security) … or, more correctly, the perceived difference. There is no difference. They are essentially the same thing. For all intents and purposes, the lay person can consider TLS version 1.0 to be SSL version 4.0. That’s not true from a technical standpoint, but as someone who deals every day with clients who just want their computers to work and are more concerned about the intricacies of their trucking business (for example), they do the same thing: encrypt your Internet connections. TLS, as the successor to SSL, is newer and better (as the “SSL version 4.0” comparison above makes clear), and you should use TLS in preference to SSL any time you have a choice.

Finally, a word about email security. It has become more and more clear to me over the years that the trend in software development is to hide things from the average user. There is a point to which this is good; after all, if you had to type in all of the commands that your email program (for example) uses to connect to the mail server to download or send your email, you might as well write a letter with a quill and ink and send it via carrier pigeon. However, if your email program is going to fail silently and send your message in the clear — i.e., over an unencrypted connection — that’s something you probably want to know about if you thought you were using an encrypted connection. But this is not something you will read about in glossy brochures extolling the virtues of this email program or that. The fact is, most people will never be aware of such an issue, and those that have the most to fear — for example, people living in or reporting on dictatorships — will only realise they have a problem when there is that ominous knock at the door that reveals their communications have been compromised.

For this reason it is not enough to rely on your email service provider — not even NinerNet Communications — to secure your communications if you are, for example, an activist in a police state or a reporter with confidential sources. No, you have to take that responsibility on yourself by encrypting the actual messages you send before you send them. How to do this is certainly beyond the scope of this post, and even if you were to do it it may not be necessary for all of your communications. But going to this extent to protect yourself in this way takes extra time and effort and may require additional software on your computer, but at the end of the day you need to determine for yourself the pros and cons in your own cost-benefit analysis.

Tags: encryption, maintenance, security, ssl/tls
Categories: Interest, Notices
1 Comment »

SSL version 3 “POODLE” vulnerability

17 October 2014 05:21:12 +0000

The latest in a series of recent vulnerabilities discovered in software commonly used on servers hosting websites and email (among other services) has reared its head. “POODLE” (conveniently discovered by the clever rhymers at Google) is a catchy name for a vulnerability found in a two-decade-old cryptographic protocol used to encrypt network connections. SSL — the secure sockets layer protocol — has become a household word over the years, and those three letters are still now used by many to refer generically to secure connections, even though SSL version 3.0 (published in 1996) was superseded by TLS (transport layer security) version 1.0 fifteen years ago (in 1999).

All of this introductory information is not intended to trivialise the problem, of course, but to give some background and illustrate how it can take a long time for new standards to be adopted, and old ones to be abandoned. Often, old standards live on simply because “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” … and now (well, three days ago) we find that the last version of SSL — version 3.0 — is indeed “broke”.

As such we will be re-configuring all of our servers still configured to allow SSL 3.0 connections to use TLS exclusively. This will require reconfiguring and restarting web servers, FTP servers and various email services. While we anticipate the work on all servers taking about an hour, interruptions in service — if there are any — should be brief and last only a few seconds at a time as services are restarted.

Of particular interest — due to a couple of recent support requests related to our newer mail server on NC027 — is that Microsoft Outlook 2003 users will likely no longer be able to connect securely to the mail servers on NC018 and NC023 (the relay server), as Outlook 2003 does not have support for TLS. Apparently a 2004 “hotfix” available from Microsoft will add TLS support to Outlook 2003, but we cannot vouch for this personally, nor are we aware of any clients who have used this. It should be noted that Microsoft stopped supporting Outlook 2003 earlier this year. It is obsolete software.

It is of interest to me personally that my favourite email program of all time — Eudora — will weather this storm and continue to flourish, as it does support TLS. However, sadly, even Eudora will eventually succumb to the ravages of time and the march of technology. In fact, I strongly suspect it only supports TLS version 1.0, and I have noticed that Google actively discourages connections from old email clients such as Eudora, probably because they likely suggest using an email client that supports at least TLS version 1.1. The latest version of TLS is 1.2, already six years old itself.

So, we will be using our weekend maintenance window to perform this maintenance. However, instead of starting at the usual time, this maintenance will begin at 21:00 UTC on Saturday, 18 October and, as stated above, should take roughly one hour. Please consult our status blog for updates on this maintenance, and please contact support if you have any questions or concerns.

Tags: google, maintenance, security
Categories: Notices
1 Comment »

“Shellshock” software bug

26 September 2014 14:17:06 +0000

You may have heard in the media about the so-called Shellshock security issue that affects a software package present on most Internet servers worldwide called “bash”. All of our servers run bash; it is a very basic building block on almost all UNIX- and Linux-based servers, which run most services on the Internet that you access every day. Bash can be loosely compared to the “command line” available on Windows-based computers.

Upon checking, we determined that the version of bash running on all of our servers was vulnerable to exploits aimed at the bug. All were immediately patched, and are no longer vulnerable. We continue to monitor security bulletins from the vendors of the operating systems we use for possible further patches related to newly-discovered vulnerabilities, should they materialise.

NinerNet takes keeping our servers updated and secure seriously. If you have any questions about this in general or this bug in particular, please contact us. Thank-you.

Tags: maintenance, security
Categories: Notices
Comments Off

OpenSSL “Heartbleed” bug

9 April 2014 20:36:32 +0000

You may have read or heard reports in the media about a software bug in a widely-used program called OpenSSL used to secure SSL connections with and between servers.

While our servers do use OpenSSL, we have checked all of our systems and none of them are vulnerable to this bug.

If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know by contacting support.

Tags: encryption, heartbleed, openssl, security, ssl
Categories: Notices
Comments Off

Connection problems for Airtel customers

30 June 2011 10:22:28 +0000

One of our Zambian clients is having some severe connectivity issues with Airtel, and two other clients have reported similar issues. The problem is that, while connected to the Internet, the IP address assigned to the customer’s phone keeps changing every few seconds. This wreaks havoc with any systems that the Airtel customer is trying to connect to that require, for security reasons, that the phone’s IP address remain constant throughout the session. This also applies if you are using an Airtel “stick” plugged into your computer.

This is most often relevant, for our clients, when trying to use either regular email or webmail. In the former instance, if the IP address assigned to your phone (or “stick”) by Airtel keeps changing every few seconds, you will likely be unable to send email, or you may get lucky and be able to send email every few tries. In the case of webmail, you will find that you will be logged out of the system constantly, often while you are actually trying to log in. This can also happen when trying to log into the control panel or any other service hosted by NinerNet that requires you to log in.

This problem exists, as noted above, with any system that requires that your IP address remain the same during a session. A “session” is the time between when you log into (using a user name and password) a website or other Internet-based service, and when you log out. Many web- and Internet-based systems require your IP address to remain constant throughout a session to prevent someone taking over your session and pretending to be you, thereby being able to log into whatever account you were logged into at the time they managed to hijack your session.

You can check your IP address by pointing your web browser to www.niner.net/go/ip. If you refresh the page every few seconds and your IP address keeps changing, then you will have the problems described above.

If you are having this problem, please contact Airtel and explain that your IP address is apparently changing every few seconds, and that this is preventing your from logging into Internet-based services. Please also let us know that you have done this, so that we can track this issue to resolution. Airtel have, apparently, been reasonably responsive on this issue with the NinerNet client mentioned above, but the issue has been going on since last week and has still not been resolved.

We apologise that your experience with NinerNet is affected by this issue. However, the problem is caused by Airtel, and the IP-based security on our systems and on many other systems used by other companies is there for a reason. It’s a very common form of security, and any connection systems provided by companies like Airtel simply must take this into consideration.

Tags: airtel, connectivity, ip address, security, support
Categories: Notices
Comments Off