[kall]

AAAAAAAAAArgh! I have been receiving my emails hours and hours after they were sent.

I just called paradise to find out why...according to the rep I spoke to, some fucker hacked into their system late Thursday night, so they yanked the system offline.

The damage done was sorted out, but they couldn't just have the 8 hours worth of emails go out at once, so things are trickling out until the backlog decreases enough to start sending normally again.

Damned hackers!

[Teelo]

So THAT explains why you didnt get my emails yesterday then...

So I should CC them all to your nzboards address then?

[kall]

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Cos I will get them today.

It's annoying. I give my customers either that email address or the sparkle hosting one that redirects to that address...because it is supposed to be always reliable, in case of network downtime.

Grrrr.

[nih]

Interesting. We had no end of users wanting us to support their goddamn email problems. [Then I said a mean thing about a user which I now retract, rage vented. ]

We also noticed one of our DNS servers go offline, although I can't remember if it was a paradise one or not. Could be unrelated.

[Bluey and Aquila]

Yep that pissed me off as I rely on Trade me to email me when I have auctions due to close and I missed bidding on two auctions casue they closed before I got my emails.

Oh and It would have been nice for them to have emailed us to tell us there was a problem.

[kall]

Email today at 3.13PM:

Originally Posted by TelstraClear

Suggested Answer
Thank you for contacting us regarding your issue. This has been escalated and you will be contacted shortly.





Discussion Thread
Customer (Ace Shattock) 23/01/2005 03.13 PM
Hi,



Today I have been receiving mail several hours after it was sent.



Is there a problem?

I sent it 2 days ago!

[kall]

Alrighty then, here's some more replies:

Originally Posted by paradise

Response (Philip) 24/01/2005 02.19 PM
Hello Ace

These mails have arrived late as one of our servers was down for a period of time for security maintenance.

We encourage you to address your billing, accounts and non-technical enquiries on our new customer e-service platform. Please make your queries at http://paradise.custhelp.com

Kind regards,
Philip
TelstraClear Internet Services

Phone: 0800 467 272 (and follow the voice prompts)

Originally Posted by me

Right..well firstly, the fact that it took 3 days to answer this question is pretty shocking.

Secondly, why did you not alert your customers to this fact prior, or as soon as was possible?

Most people rely on their ISP email, because it is supposed to be…reliable.

I know of several people who are very unhappy with this situation, as they missed important emails (such as notification their trademe auction had been outbid). Had they been made aware of this fact, they could have had their mail forwarded to another account.

B&A: look at what he has to say here:

Originally Posted by paradise

Response (Philip) 24/01/2005 03.53 PM
Hello Ace

As you may be aware many business' do not have a full staff present on weekends.

Customers were told as soon as possible.

We encourage you to address your billing, accounts and non-technical enquiries on our new customer e-service platform. Please make your queries at http://paradise.custhelp.com

Kind regards,
Philip
TelstraClear Internet Services

Originally Posted by me

Customers were told as soon as possible?

You mean “we have grudgingly given out a cover story of ‘security maintenance’ rather than ‘somebody hacked our servers’ to those customers who asked what had happened to their email”

I had to phone the helpdesk and fill out a support ticket to find out…there have been no emails sent from paradise explaining the problem or alerting customers of it, nor is there any kind of announcement on the paradise,net page, apologizing or alerting customers.

P.S: I think the word you were looking for there was ‘businesses’..the use of an apostrophe to denote plurality is incorrect.

To which they replied:

Originally Posted by paradise

Response (Philip) 24/01/2005 04.46 PM
Hello Ace

There is no cover story. Negative ideals can always be formed if you are willing to try.

You may wish to view our homepage as carefully as our grammar to find the link explaining the server outage.

We encourage you to address your billing, accounts and non-technical enquiries on our new customer e-service platform. Please make your queries at http://paradise.custhelp.com

Kind regards,
Philip
TelstraClear Internet Services

Okay, so there is a link at the top of the page now...may well have been there before. It says this:

Originally Posted by http://www2.paradise.net.nz/security_update/news.html

Security issue - email and web hosting

A small number of Paradise.net customers may have have experienced email delays and web-hosting problems on Thursday January 20th and Friday January 21st.

Early Thursday morning some Paradise email was delayed. Our security people detected a security threat and disconnected a server to preserve the integrity of Paradise.net.

This server will be reconnected shortly and backlogged email should be delivered this afternoon (Friday January 21).

As part of our security precautions we also disconnected hardware which hosts Paradise web pages. We have been working round the clock to ensure the hardware can be reconnected with no risk to Paradise.net or Paradise users. We expect to restore web pages this evening.

We know that an external party has attempted to interfere with Paradise.net. This attempt was picked up and immediate steps were taken to avoid any further impact on Paradise.net customers.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience these very necessary steps have caused. Our approach, as always, is to take firm steps to preserve the security of Paradise.net and protect our customers.

the team at Paradise.net

What I would like to know is: Did anyone who uses Paradise receive any emails notifying them of this?

[trogg]

Originally Posted by kall

What I would like to know is: Did anyone who uses Paradise receive any emails notifying them of this?

I have a Paradise dial up account for my parents and check the emails regularly (cause my parents are hopeless and do not) with Mailwasher (great program for removing identifying spam).

To date I have NOT received ANY emails from them regarding this problem but I am not in the habit of ringing the support desk or checking a web page to see if their email server is working correctly when I will only receive one email per month via Paradise.

[nih]

Stick it to 'em some more, that comeback of his was pretty shocking. Whom is paying whom? He doesn't have the right of pert response.

Ask for his manager's email address and send the lot on. Don't forget to restate all your issues clearly or they'll have nothing to respond to.

[kall]

Alrighty then:

Originally Posted by me

Indeed. They certainly can.
As I was told by one member of your staff that there had been a hack made, and your answer to my initial email query was to tell me that a server was down for Security Maintenance, I feel that your answer was not as informative as it could have been.
Be that as it may, your comment “As you may be aware many business’ do not have a full staff present on weekends, customers were told as soon as possible.” sounded less like an apology/resolution, and more like an excuse. A pitiful excuse, and a lie as well.
Not one of the people I have asked received any kind of email from paradise, advising them that Security Maintenance was due to take place. Even if paradise does not have a full staff on weekends, how hard is it to type an email alerting people and then send it to ‘paradise customers@paradise’? It doesn’t take a fully-staffed office to do that.
All in all, I am very disappointed with your handling of my query, and would like to know the email address of the Customer Service manager at paradise so I can forward this correspondence to him/her.

And the response:

Originally Posted by paradise

Response (Philip) 25/01/2005 10.23 AM
Hello Ace

Security maintenance. Maintaining security.
This was not a planned thing that we can advise about when the server has to be taken down without warning to maintain the systems integrity.

Our technicians have been busy dealing with the issue rather than stopping to write a step by step report.
What we worry about is maintaining the security of our system.

I do not intend to argue points with you over excuses/apologies as you seem to be wanting an argument which is counter-productive.

My apologies that my answers have not been satisfactory, but this is the only case where someone has taken offence to this information, and I feel
this is because you have misunderstood 'security maintenance' to be a planned thing. This is no conspiracy.

Please feel free to call the customer services team leader to convey your opinion. 0800 467 272.

We encourage you to address your billing, accounts and non-technical enquiries on our new customer e-service platform. Please make your queries at http://paradise.custhelp.com

Kind regards,
Philip
TelstraClear Internet Services

[nih]

I think your main point to focus on is that you were confused, wanted answers and were given two different stories. When you asked for clarification they were rude to you.

Maybe you should just express your dissatisfaction with your wallet and change ISPs. Paradise have certainly gone to the dogs.

[kall]

OOOOH! Received today:

Originally Posted by paradise.net.nz

* Email delays
* Home pages and web page issues
* Please visit the paradise.net home page to check for any issues in future

Last week you may have noticed delays in receiving email via paradise.net, and that Paradise home and web pages were off line for a couple of days.

This was necessary following a security threat to paradise.net.

As part of our standard security operation our team detected an unauthorised third party accessing the internal servers of paradise.net. Immediate steps were taken to prevent this and avoid any impact on paradise.net or our customers. The result was that some of our servers were removed from service while the threat was quantified and removed, and before customer's information could be accessed or corrupted.

Our security team worked round the clock to ensure the servers were clear of potential problems before they were put back into service - with double and triple checking that we had removed the problem. In addition, this work was subject to an external peer review - so we took no chances with our security or yours.

An unfortunate side effect of acting quickly was that we were not able to forewarn you of the loss of service. And once the servers had been taken off line the build up in email traffic meant we could not email you to advise of the problem.

We did add a message to the paradise.net home page, which some customers would have seen, and spoke to others who called in.

We have revised our security protocols so that this attempt to interfere with paradise.net cannot happen again. For any ISP, however, there's always the possibility of a loss of service that affects email
- and therefore the ability to quickly advise what's going on.

In future, please make the paradise.net home page your first port of call if you have any email, home page or web page issues. We'll post information as soon as it's available.

We'd like to apologise for the problems of the past week and thank you for your understanding. We'll continue to do everything we can to make sure you get the best web service possible - without risking your security.


The team at paradise.net

Only took them 9 days!

[Bluey and Aquila]

Originally Posted by kall

OOOOH! Received today:


Only took them 9 days!

i got one of those today as well, I was thinking to myself as I read " oh this is so last week " lol

[Bluey and Aquila]

TelstraClear investigates unauthorised third party access to the internal servers of its paradise.net service
2 February 2005

A forensic investigation is being undertaken by TelstraClear following a security threat to one of its Internet services last week.

The company says an unauthorised third party accessed the internal servers of its paradise.net service last week, resulting in immediate security action.

Spokesman Matthew Boland says some servers were shut down while the threat was identified and dealt with, resulting in an interruption of service to customers.

He says an investigation into the security breach is underway, although it is too soon to say whether the hacker was based locally or internationally.

[nih]

Sounds like their security response includes a code-red Rude To Customers stance, just in case they're hackers too.

I think providers need to stop taking security breaches as a personal affront that they can use to shift the blame for downtime and start assuming responsibility for them. Just because there's a script-kiddie to lay some responsibility with doesn't mean we can't rationalise the situation as "this ISP doesn't keep their servers patched".

It's been ten years since I got into IT, and the only time I've seen someone take pride in their work was when it was a two or three man show. Get any larger than that, get any more corporate than that, start doing it for the money, and suddenly all that job-pride takes a back seat.

An unfortunate part of group mentality is to suddenly begin settling for second best because the ideal situation seems unachievable with diverse input. That and the lack of personal responsibility - because who's going to take the blame for something they don't take pride in?

[nih]

My own connection had outages for the last couple of weeks or so as well.

I called Iconz several times, finally getting joy in the weekend when they decided that they'd tried to patch my router remotely and it'd failed. Or they'd rolled a patch back. Perhaps wrongly. Or perhaps the patch didn't go on at all. One of them said the file said something about a patch but he didn't know what that was. One thing they were all in agreement with each other about that my wireless 802.11g interface was officially called "a little black box".

After speaking to three people since then I can't get a straight answer as to what happened, and they allowed that they have no testing procedure to see if a patch fucked a client up or not. I made one of them promise to notify me next time they were doing a patch so I wouldn't have to find out the hard way - so he said he put a sticky on my notes.

Another thing they did consistently was to make sure I'd tried resetting it like a good noob, including the dweeb who I talked tech with for five minutes and was then offered the last plug-pulling episode as thing that fixed it, not the patch.

I wonder if this is what their business connection service is like.

It's official: Iconz are monkeys. But then so is every other ISP in NZ, so pick your tree.