Our old Data SIM service is due to be switched off by the network provider this weekend. Affected customers have already been posted new 'Bluewave' SIMs, and many customers have already swapped over. This post is here in case customers are unaware of this happening.
There is information on our News page regarding the need for the SIM swap. If customers are having problems then please do email us over the weekend or get in touch with us on Saturday (10am-2pm) or during the week.
UPDATE: SIMs did not drop at the weekend as expected. This means customers have a bit more time to migrate to the new SIMs. We're not sure when the old SIM service will stop working though.
ZyXEL have published a security advisory which covers some of the ZyXEL routers we have provided our customers, the DX3301 and VMG3927.
New firmware has been released. Customers can either load this manually, or use the 'Upgrade Firmware' button found on the router information page on our Control Pages.
We have received further clarification that the vulnerabilities affect the router's web interface when exposed to the internet. Routers we configure for customers will have the web interface only allowable from our office IP range, and so this vulnerability is deemed low risk. We still recommend that customers upgrade. The upgrade process will take a few minutes but it does not reset the configuration.
We will make direct contact with customers with these routers, and support staff will mention this if and when they are talking to customers and notice the firmware is out of date.
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.