Wasting time

I already told you about the silly number of chancers trying to get uninvited access to our customers’ VoIP systems, and how uncanny is to see the same IP addresses being banned swiftly from all the systems we monitor, thanks to our intelligent network and a little help from our honeypots.

Most of these attempts come from IP addresses owned by small hosting companies, where you can rent your virtual machine for a few quid a year and do whatever you fancy with it. These small, often barely cobbled up rent-a-mob junk yards don’t care one dot about what you do with their rusty metal, anything goes. There is no control on what you can send or receive, what you host, whose data you hold, etcetera.

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The sharks are circling

Not a happy place

In the past few days we had a few customers contacting us to ask what were our contract terms.

My gut feeling is that there’s an offensive from some very determined salesmen doing the rounds and carpet-phoning businesses in this neck of the woods to make a quick buck promising to “save you a bundle on your phone bills”.

Please do not fall for these scammers, they’re recycled salesmen from some pyramid scheme, paid on commission for every customer won, without the faintest idea of what services you have, how they work or if really you are paying too much.

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Computers and Cowboys

I have spent the whole day looking after some customers’ systems, and not a single one of them was set up properly, not even remotely close.

I don’t mean that there was something wrong with them: EVERYTHING was WRONG on so many levels that I am now sad.

Sad to see that an extremely important, for some of you vital staple of your daily business is trumped by the sheer incompetence of some self-appointed “computer experts”.

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A day at the office

You might believe that in a business sector so hyper-technological like ours, every day something amazing happens. Well, I’m sorry to shatter your dreams of glory and awe, but most of my day is filled with a basic daily grind, like many other office jobs.

The truth is that I rarely have the time to be social: either write here in this blog, post a few tweets, update our status on Facebook or even just get started with Google+. Until something happens, and I feel the need to let some steam off, or to update you about some fantastic news. I’m sorry, this time is a rant but there are some words of advice attached.

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Enough

It’s now three months that all of our VoIP systems are logging any hacking attempt, and it’s astonishing to realize that not a day has passed that one of our systems has not been targeted with one or more attempts.

Most of these attacks come from 5cr1p7 K1dd13z trying their pot luck from “rogue” countries (China, North Korea, Russia, etc…) where ISPs are not patrolling what happens on their network, but sometimes we’ve been targeted by largest criminal organizations (ab)using powerful services like Amazon EC2.

Our systems ban instantly (less than 1 second) the IP where the attempt comes from, making any further attempt fruitless, and the data gathered by the attackers in this small amount of time almost meaningless and totally useless.

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