Slashdot Mirror
ISP Closes Webmail After Spammers Get Addresses
An anonymous reader writes "Error prone British ISP PlusNet, who you might remember for accidentally deleting 700GB of customer's e-mail last year, have done it again with a major security gaffe.
Their webmail service was compromised this week, and spammers got hold of customers' e-mail addresses who they've been happily spamming away ever since. They've since made the decision to close their webmail service, in the ultimate admission of incompetence for the now BT owned ISP.
In an e-mail to their customers, Network director Phil Webb goes on to recommend that their customers install security software, along with telling them that they shouldn't call up to complain. One might suggest that they need to practice what they preach."
Not all that surprising, this is a company whose account password policy is 5-8 characters, all lower case, no non-alphanumeric characters. I've been with plus.net for ages, they seemed fantastic after my truly awful experiences with Demon, but they've been much worse recently - they broke routing recently so that I couldn't connect to my work VPN for days. Anybody recommend any other decent UK ISPs? I hear good things about Pipex.
PIPEX are looking to be bought out. Maybe by tiscali.
Get a real ISP, like Black Cat Networks or Andrews and Arnold Ltd. Alternatively, UKFSN (an Enta.net reseller) are pretty good, if you're tighter around the pocket.
[Captcha: protests]
I've been with PlusNet a long time, they used to be excellent, however as has been observed their service is NOT what it was and is getting worse.. Thanks to their incompetence I am now getting dozens of SPAMs each day on an account that never got any (I keep it to friends and family). All the family have had to turn on SPAM filters for their accounts, and yes that was and is possible if you watch who you give email addresses to.
This time PlusNet waited days to tell us what had happened. (I assumed a close friend's system had been infected and skimmed, I never even thought the ISP had screwed up).
Information was the minimum they could pass on, I still have no idea if the SPAMMERs had access to the emails, but I assume they did, fortunately I never pass sensitive data in emails, but a LOT of people treat email as if it was a real letter..
I think the best part is the pointer to their web site in the email the eventually sent out. It has "Tips on avoiding SPAM".. I read it and somehow they left out "And no matter what you do we can publish your address and all your efforts come to nothing."
They've not only been throttling P2P (I found it quicker to download the UBUNTU Feisty ISO via HTTP than over Bittorrent!). They are obsessed with pushing you to use their Website rather than calling them. I've always recommended that you don't use an ISP which doesn't have a reasonably priced phone number. My last query on the PlusNet "No Help Now" website was ignored for a week until I *had* to phone them.
I left BT because of the appalling service and now I am looking to move off PlusNet, fortunately the UK opened up the exchanges so I have a wide choice, it's just a matter of finding one that offers a decent customer support and isn't being ruined by BT.
It's a pretty sad state of affairs. I used to be with Plus Net, and they used to be really good. I dropped their service when they sacked a lot of their technical guys and hired a premium-rate call centre to handle their technical queries through a very s...l...o...w... script instead of just talking to you on an ordinary national-rate 'phone line to talk to someone who actually knew what was going on. The guys in the call centre used to look at the same web page as I did to find out if there were any problems.
But the most impressive thing about the article remains the idea that they closed their webmail service, and then emailed their users to tell them...
Andrews & Arnold (http://www.aaisp.net.uk/) have been excellent for me. IPv6, as many IPs as you need, excellent customer service, free domain with a standard ADSL account, unlimited downloads in the evening, IMAP/POP/webmail access with antispam & virus. I've been with them for a few months now and they have been by far the best ISP I have come across in the UK. They do limit usage during the day (I'm on 1GB a month during 0800-1800 Mon-Fri), but over usage is charged in small increments, should you go over it. I'm a pretty heavy user, and I've still not managed to hit my usage limit. If you look on the web site they have an IRC channel where users and staff are happy to help out and answer any questions about the service.