Over the weekend we had a wave of fraud accounts sneak through our fraud detection system and become active on some of our servers. Within hours they were detected by weekend support people and were immediately removed.

The issue we faced was that the fraudulent account managed to begin sending out spam before we spotted it and and we ended up on a few anti-spam blacklists. As we have no real control over these lists, we were then stuck for a few days waiting for our listing to be removed by the list administrators. Whilst this was going on other people at M6.Net were busy watching the affected servers managing the issue (the volume of spam had the effect of slowing down normal mail delivery) and following up with all third parties to clear the issue as soon as possible.

Being a hosting company we get up to a 100 or so fraud attempts each week. Each week our fraud detection systems get smarter. Just recently we have seen the bad guys try and get smarter than our systems. This is all related to various "bad guys" around the internet trying to think up smarter and more effective ways of deceiving people with their fraud activities. Just recently a wave of new phishing attempts are being tried ranging from fraud eBay messages from fictitious eBay members to well orchestrated email correspondence with people, posing as a bank representative to build up trust and then extract key information to take over an identity, and then there is the fraud lottery sites and fraud eCommerce sites. I have even seen some attempts to contact M6.Net clients as us, M6.Net, and extract login and password details. It is extremely important you check all details of people who who make contact with you asking you to login and reply to a message, update details or ask for personally identifiable information.

With the changes in our payment processing system we have had to contact clients to request an update of their information. Our system is set up so that you can go to https://copanel.com to update your information. Always check the domain name carefully before entering any information and be careful before logging into any web site. It takes a second to check the address bar before hitting the submit button - it can take a lot longer to clean up problems.

This week we were hit by a number of fraudulent sign ups that managed to begin using our mail servers to send phishing and spam mail. The accounts were quickly shut down, but the residual effects still linger -- we're still listed on a couple of spam blacklists, and mail delivery slowed considerably for some users. Michael explains in a little more detail above.

We have also added a few new features to the control panel -- allowing clients with account-related issues (expired credit cards, etc.) to update their accounts with no intervention from us; hopefully freeing up support from having to answer billing-related queries.

This week's a busy one for support, with 2 issues currently causing an influx of queries, one of which is related to a Mail server issue and a web server has experienced disk issues. Both issues are under control and in the process of being resolved. I'd also like to remind clients again to make sure their payment and contact details are up to date, as we are still experiencing payment issues with some clients who have out of date details, which is resulting in account suspensions.

This week development has mainly been involved in fixing control panel bugs and also in developing a mass rejection system for billing.

Also control panel has had some more updates. Clients who were required to send in Credit Card authorization forms can now access it from control panel.