Our systems are detecting a large increase in the number of ‘phishing’ emails [What is “phishing” and should I be worried about it?] targetting the Halifax Bank.

Currently the large proportion of these are being detected and deleted by our system. However it is possible that the occasional one will slip through.

Halifax Online have provided some information on the emails and dealing with them. Also we suggest reading How to spot a Phishing scam

Most importantly NEVER reveal your online banking details via email.

Further to our recent development project Bounce Attack Prevention we are now able to provide our customers the ability to reject incorrectly bounced mail.

The system does have some limitations but used correctly with white listing where appropriate can have a massive impact in reducing the number of false bounces customers may receive.

“Give us your bank details and we will give you $10m” - If someone said that to you on the street I imagine you would just walk on by. However this is the basis of the commonly referred to “Nigerian Email Scam” and unfortunately there are people still falling victim to this type of scam due to the professionalism it can display and the determination of the actual fraudsters.

The “Nigerian Email Scam” has been around for some time. Originally it was sent using traditional postal mail however with the increased usage of the internet it is much cheaper and quicker to target thousands of recipients.

AGUK is pleased to announce the implementation of automatic whitelisting on our email servers. The system works by whitelisting mail servers meeting certain criteria and reducing the false positives on emails such as those from eBay.

The Automatic Email Whitelisting has been in development for some time and we are pleased to roll this out in to production. 

After upgrading Helm to version 3.2.9 customers can now manage Web Forwarding and the Default Documents from within Helm.

Two new KB articles have been produced to assist in using these features.

We had to perform an update to the Helm Control Panel at 16:30 today. The update was essential due to a potential security issue.

We apologise to customers affected during the 30 minute outage of the control panel while the update took place.

We are currently looking to introduce an affiliate program designed to reward existing customers who refer new customers to AGUK.

We are currently working on the technicalities of such a program such as incorporating referral codes and managing the many payment methods we support.

The data centre housing our backup mail and DNS server has announced the following scheduled maintenance below. This will have no affect on our primary services hosted in the UK.

On Sunday night, January 15, 2006 The Planet will be conducting site-wide network maintenance on the TippingPoint network anti-intrusion system at the DLLSTX2 data center for 4 hours, beginning at 11:59PM CDT (GMT-0500).Although the scheduled work is expected to be transparent to customers, it is possible that some latency and packet loss may be experienced for very brief periods of time during the upgrade.

Some users have recently experienced a “Bounce Attack” on their email account.

This happens when someone sends mail pretending to be from your domain and the mail is then bounced by the receiving server back to your mailbox as the mail was purportedly from you even though you never sent it. This can become a problem if thousands/millions of messages are bounced back to you. This is commonly referred to as “joe-job”

We are looking at how to combat this and have come upon a possible solution.

In the next few weeks the Helm control panel will be updated to include:

Web Forwarding Support - Users will be able to add a domain and have this forward to a different domain, internal or external.

Default Document Management - Users will be able to specify new default documents or change the order of their default documents for their website.