Newsletters

Almost Monthly Newsletter to Inspire customers 

Hi all, these seem to be few and far between at the moment, but as we crawl out of Winter and in to Spring, everything starts to perk up a bit.

 

Security Incident

We recently had our customer helpdesk “phished” to change one of our customers’ password, using information gathered from other sources. This has caused a lot of havoc for that customer in their world, as the miscreant gained access to their emails, and then started changing passwords to other sites, attempting to sell shares, access banking and the like, also using the emails stored on our servers via our webmail to generally cause harm to our customer. We are unsure how they got the customers data to begin with, but there was a recent Ticketmaster hack that exposed up to 560 million (yes million) customer accounts / details – see https://www.cyberdaily.au/security/10632-hackers-claim-ticketmaster-live-nation-data-breach-more-than-500m-compromised if you want to read about it. 

Unfortunately, E-mail was designed in a time of trust on the Internet, that has not scaled well into the modern world, and there are not a lot of protection mechanisms available once someone can get your password, and once they have your password, they can use your email to reset passwords at other websites, and also have access to any emails you have left on our system, including your sent items. In years gone by people “popped” their emails, which was like going to your letterbox (being us) and taking all your email home, so it was no longer in your letterbox (on our servers). In modern days, E-mail clients use a protocol called “IMAP” which is like going to the letterbox (being us), taking a copy of your email, but also leaving a copy in the letterbox until you decide to delete it. 

Changes at Inspire Helpdesk

To try to prevent this in the future we are implementing changes to our Helpdesk procedures that you should be aware of

1. Currently we validate from information that we have, that you are the customer in question dealing with us (using Date of Birth, address and the like)
1. In the immediate term, we will validate the caller ID of your number, if this is not a number we know, we will call you back on a number we know
2. We are implementing 2Factor authorization on our “My Inspire” / “My Account” web interface from our website, should be active around 20th October
1. This is an option you will be able to turn on when you go to this page, and set up on your phone / authentication device
2. You will need an authenticator app such as Google Authenticator, which is free for your device
3. We will publish a help article on this and link it from in the My Inspire portal once 2Factor is ready to go
3. We are also implementing call recording on our Call Centre phones
1. In future instead of the usual friendly human answering the phone, there will be a message letting you know about this before the human
2. We don’t like not answering the phone directly, but keeping the call records for monitoring and training may help in the future

Currently our webmail is attacked thousands of times a day by people trying to use it to send junk / spam emails, and it has protection in as many ways as we can such as

1. If you get your password wrong 3 times in a row, it will make you wait to try again
2. If you get your password wrong 15 times in a row, it will blacklist where you are trying from for 24 hours
3. There is no point putting 2Factor authentication on the webmail, as you can talk directly to the server with just the username and password, as that is how E-Mail was designed to work
4. Mostly people get emails convincing them to send their password, and then this is used to send spam / junk through us, rather than do what has happened to our customer above
5. Remember to never share your password, and to make sure it is not a simple one

Wireless and Fibre Network upgrades

As the longer days and settled weather roll around, we are getting back into upgrades on our wireless network, we have now completed upgrades on all the Rural Wireless towers that we took over this year, except one that is up by the windfarm. Our customer upgrades team will be working over the next few months to get all the Rural Wireless customers moved over on to Inspire services, and at the same time looking where we can use better towers for some of our Inspire customers to make their experience better. We are also upgrading some of our own towers to a newer radio technology to enable more people to upgrade to our 50Mbit service if they want it, and installing new licensed backhaul services to many more of our towers as our own fibre network continues to expand to allow us places to add more bandwidth to connect to the wireless network.

We have completed our current fibre build around Sanson / Halcombe / Mt Biggs / Lees Rd / Sandon Rd, Rongotea and Awahuri, and our team are now working on migrating customers over from wireless to fibre, and also installing fibre for people that want to connect that were not customers.

Our build team is now moving into our Colyton build a little later than planned due to recent rainy weather. We are underway from Hiwinui to above Ashhurst, and from Hiwinui to Colyton to Feilding along with a few side roads, and we have added another 6km up towards Cheltenham to get as far as Almadale Road at this stage. You can see this build at https://www.inspire.net.nz/colyton, it is about 6 months total to get the actual fibre all in the ground, but we will be connecting people as the fibre starts to go past their houses. If you have not pre-registered, or you have a neighbor that is not a customer of ours, please let them know to register on our website so that we make sure we leave a fibre tail at their boundary as we go past.


 

On a Personal Note

Finally, there are so many children in need on Give-a-Little at the moment, but if you have a little to spare, which is challenging in the current economic climate, there is a little girl Maia, who is a local to our community that is trying to get support for some overseas medical treatment. She has a Give-a-Little webpage at https://givealittle.co.nz/cause/help-us-fund-medical-treatment-for-maia-not, and is struggling to raise funds and I would like to do my little bit to help. So along with letting you all know about her cause, we will also be making a contribution to try to help her on her way.




Cheers, enjoy Spring, roll on Summer.
James @ InSPire