Virus Alert

VIRUS outbreaks have been rampant over the past few weeks. There is one in particular that we would like to draw your attention to.

The MYTOB virus has been out since Memorial Day and it is spreading very rapidly. In a nutshell, you receive an email that looks like it's from your ISP (ie. Sterling), explaining that your email account has been disabled for security reasons. It asks you to open that attachment and follow the instructions. Guess what happens when you open the attachment? It infects your machine, and sends a copy of the virus to everyone in your address book. These emails are obviously not from Sterling, even though they did a pretty good job of making it look like it was from us. It's a virus and simply needs to be deleted.

Here are the subject lines that are the most prevalent. If you see an email one of these subject lines, just delete the email without opening it. If you find that you've been infected, simply run your local virus scanning software and it should take care of cleaning things up.

Email Account Suspension
Your Email Account is Suspended For Security Reasons
Your email account has been blocked
Notice of account limitation
Notice: **Last Warning**
*DETECTED* Online User Violation
*WARNING* Your Email Account Will Be Closed
Account Alert
Important Notification
Security measures

You can review the detailed information on the Trend Micro website by clicking here.    

Verizon is wreaking havoc on business DSL customers

For the past few weeks, Verizon has been sweeping through the Northwest upgrading the DSL equipment in their Central Offices. Normally, this type of upgrade happens transparently and causes very little trouble. Unfortunately, this particular upgrade is having some various serious side effects on our business clients.

For some reason, the equipment change is breaking selective DSL connections. This means that as they roll out an upgrade in a particular part of town, some number of DSL links will break, spontaneously, without warning.

The real problem in encountered when you try to make them aware of the issue. Hold times in their support queues are over two hours, and it can take up to 6 days for them to repair the broken connection. This is primarily due to the mass number of outages, but is also compounded by the fact that DSL is a residential class service and does not constitute the same priority that the business class connections enjoy.

When DSL first entered the scene, everyone was excited about this new technology that was inexpensive and very fast. Now, 5 years later, it has settled into it's rightful place. Still inexpensive and fast, but not appropriate for mission critical applications. If Internet access is critical to your business, and you can't afford an outage like this, call our sales department and let us help you put together contingency plan, or move you to a service that is appropriately dependable for your business needs. Call Geoff at 503-968-8908 x227.