Over the past week we have seen a huge number of 'bots' trying to guess customer email credentials in order to try to send email through our outbound email servers: smtp.aa.net.uk.
The attempts were being blocked due to wrong passwords being used, but this caused significant load on our severs due to all the database lookups involved. To address this, we are blocking IP addresses that are listed on the Spamhaus 'Exploits Blocklist (XBL)' and the Spamhaus 'Combined Spam Sources (CSS)' lists. -These are typically IP address known to have hijacked in some way or known spam senders.
This has reduced the load on the email servers significantly, however we are are still blocking around 1.5 million unique IP addresses each day.
We have had a small number of legitimate customers affected by this as their IP address is on these blocklists. (IPs can be looked up on https://check.spamhaus.org). In these cases, please do contact support and we can discuss workarounds.
We have had a few customers who are using other ISPs and who are behind 'CGNAT' - this is where the IP address that is used to access the internet is shared with a number of other customers of that ISP. As the IP address is shared with others the listing of it in the Spamhaus lists could be due to the actions of any other customer of the ISP who also uses the shared IP address. In these cases, we'd suggest the following:
We are blocking around 200,000 bot IP addresses per day, however we have had a small number of legitimate customers being blocked. As a result, we have made a change which will help these customers.
We ask that if customers are having problems sending email due to their IP being listed on the Spamhaus block lists that they set the port they use for sending email to smtp.aa.net.uk to be 587. Our mail servers will block the first attempt but will then allow subsequent attempts through.
Due 9¼ hours ago (overdue)
This notification is for customers who run their own authoritative DNS servers and use our secondary-dns.co.uk as secondary (slave).
As part of our DNS infrastructure project we will start to initiate Zone Transfers from an additional set of IP addresses.
You will still send your NOTIFY to secondary-dns.co.uk but you will start to see AXFR requests from an additional set of IP addresses.
Therefore, please update your ACLs to allow the following addresses in addition to what you have at the moment:
Please update your ACLs by March 11th.
We will have an overlap of using the existing DNS servers and the new DNS servers. As part of our testing we will start to use the new IP addresses from February 17th
This is only relevant to customers who run their own authoritative DNS servers and use our secondary-dns.co.uk as an additional nameserver.
Overview: We run a "secondary" DNS service for customers where they run the master DNS server and we are secondary slaves. We have a project underway that involves migrating all our authoritative DNS services to a new platform. As part of this we are needing to disable some of the automation we do for adding and updating the customer's master IP address automatically.
The change: From June 17th, If you run your own master DNS server for your domain(s) and secondary-dns.co.uk is a slave, if you change the IP address of your master you will need to contact support@aa.net.uk to request us to update our side.We have more information about our Authoritative DNS project on our Support Site: https://support.aa.net.uk/New_Authoritive_DNS
This change has been made.
Due 8 months ago (overdue)
This will search through the various outages and maintenance reports we have received from our suppliers which may be affecting you.
You can also see a list of outages and maintenance work we receive from our suppliers that may affect your specific broadband service on the Control Pages.
The search box above should find posts affecting your service however, you can use a Keyword search.
This is the status page of Andrews & Arnold Ltd.
Our status page shows outages (problems) and maintenance (planned work) that happen on our own network and systems and also that of our suppliers networks and systems. We try and ensure this site is updated as soon as possible with incidents as they happen. Live discussion of issues is usually available on IRC.
The last update was Yesterday 13:23:07