We’ve been very quiet of late and keeping our heads down and working on new sites, but we have noticed on the stats of many websites that there are attempts by robots to try to gain access to files on website that are relating to online shops and people selling their services online.

In your Stats look out for:

/refund_policy

/moneyback.request.php

/refundform.php

Look for these in the 404 pages as their has been a huge increase in sites being attached this month.

We believe that these are programs written to extract information from your website to payment gateways such as paypal and worldpay

If you see these, report them to your web master and make sure to get your site backed up asap.

We are getting  a lot of calls to the office this week asking about the following email that many people are getting. It is s scam, delete it, these people know that many people in Ireland are claiming more tax back etc

Scam Email = Delete.

If you do get an email like this just look at the location of the link that the image will bring you too. It will be a strange website address that hopefully google will have blocked by now.

My advice is to delete then call us to set up a spam filter for your email so these type of emails are not slowing down your business day. You are busy enough without having to deal with this type of confusing email.

Call Cada Media Ltd on 053 9430748 and talk to Dave Jordan about setting up a spam filters for your staff email today.

We noticed today that we recieved an email for the the ICS monitoring Team threatening to cut of internet access.

This is spam email delete it.

The email looks like this:

Warning: This message has had one or more attachments removed
Warning: (report.exe, report.zip).
Warning: Please read the “cadamedia-Attachment-Warning.txt” attachment(s) for more information.

Your internet access is going to get suspended

The Internet Service Provider Consorcium was made to protect the rights of software authors, artists.
We conduct regular wiretapping on our networks, to monitor criminal acts.

We are aware of your illegal activities on the internet wich were originating from

You can check the report of your activities in the past 6 month that we have attached. We strongly advise you to stop your activities regarding the illegal downloading of copyrighted material of your internet access will be suspended.

Sincerely
ICS Monitoring Team

Just to let our spam filtering clients know that next week we are upgrading our servers again, (yes i know a pain in the ass but hey it’s for your benefit!) These new servers will mean new IP addresses and so we are informing you that you can update your firewall rules with the following IP addresses for our servers.

To do this you need to block all SMTP transactions from outside the following:

Filter 4: 77.95.34.194 to 254
Filter 5: 195.97.252.82 to 92
Filter 6: 86.54.206.48 to 55

Your network manager will know what to do with these, If is important that you take action on these firewall changes before Tuesday 26th January 2010.

Dave Jordan
Cada Media Ltd,
https://secure.spamfilters.ie

These are the types of letters many businesses understand to be about the renewal of their domain in Ireland, where as really they are an invitation to be listed on an Internet directory for Ireland for a cost of €958 per annum for a 3 year contract.

I suggest throwing it away, it’s rubbish, they are just opportunists and trying to get you to send them money thinking its your domain name renewal.

It looks like that Truvo Ireland are the latest company finding that other business are approaching their clients and requesting that they spend their advertising budget with them. A few weeks ago we had UK companies calling our clients leading the client to believe they were Google. Many believed it and signed up to a Google adword campaign and paying over £150 per month on pay per click advertising worth only 20 euro a month.

If you get any requests to renew advertising services with Truvo, call them and confirm before you give your hard earned money to someone else.

As the recession kicks in further in Ireland more and more people are grabbing a straws to help their failing businesses. There are dodgy dealers in every business so double check where your sending your money.

Below is an email we received from Truvo Ireland today.

Pass the word.

*******************

Email from Truvo

Valued Truvo Customer – Please Beware!

Dear Sir/ Madam,

Truvo Ireland Ltd., publishers of the Golden Pages and goldenpages.ie, are aware that certain companies unrelated to Truvo are currently using our identity to mislead businesses into purchasing advertising.

The communications from these companies typically concern a request to either renew existing advertising, or alternatively to purchase advertising within a “Yellow Pages” product which is being misrepresented as the Golden Pages. This will not result in any advertisement appearing within either the Golden Pages directory, and/ or on goldenpages.ie.

We advise all customers to beware of any suspicious requests and not to sign any contract that you believe is related to the Golden Pages unless it is on our letter-headed paper and containing all of the following elements:

If you receive any suspicious correspondence or are in any doubt as to the authenticity of any communication, please contact either your existing Advertising Account Executive or our Customer Care team directly on (01) 618 8000.

We at Truvo Ireland Ltd. are doing everything possible in our power to prevent these incidences from occurring and have informed An Garda Síochána. Our customer service and legal departments are working closely together to inform our customers of these incidents.

Kind Regards,

Angelique Kouvelis
Head of Marketing

Visit Our Blog: http://blog.goldenpages.ie/
Visit Us On Twitter: http://twitter.com/goldenpages_ie
Visit Us On http://www.facebook.com/pages/goldenpages

You have just received a virtual postcard from a friend ! Spam Virus

Do Not Open the link on this email

Unless every person I  know has a friend suddenly sending them postcards from the edge ( of reason) I would strongly advise NOT to open or click on the link in the above email subject titled:

You have just received a virtual postcard from a friend !

it could be a recently warned against virus that will attck you computer and cause you untold misery just beforeChristmas.

the general rule with strange or unusual emails:

delete them. If you don’t know who it’s from just delete it. If its a bonafide email the person sending it to you will contact you again by phone or some other way – for eg a normal email with a persons name and information…

One of my clients email in this morning wondering if we could unlock this email is was due in. this is a scam bullshit email and I simply replied, spam / scam …delete it.

I suggest you yo the same, unless you are actually expecting a delivery, if so they would not send you a .exe program through the net, its an attached virus!

DELETE IT.

***************************

From: DHL Service [mailto:clients email address was here]
Sent: 12 November 2009 11:11
To: real-name@was-here.ie
Subject: {Filename?} DHL Tracking Number 3YMH6JJY

Warning: This message has had one or more attachments removed
Warning: (3YMH6JJY.exe, 3YMH6JJY.zip).
Warning: Please read the “cadamedia-Attachment-Warning.txt” attachment(s)
for more information.

Dear customer!

The courier company was not able to deliver your parcel by your address.

You may pickup the parcel at our post office personaly.

The shipping label is attached to this e-mail.
Please print this label to get this package at our post office.

Thank you for attention.
DHL Express Services.

*******************************

Our scanner attached the following text file

This is a message from the MailScanner E-Mail Virus Protection Service
———————————————————————-
The original e-mail attachment “3YMH6JJY.zip”
is on the list of unacceptable attachments for this site and has been
replaced by this warning message.

If you wish to receive a copy of the original attachment, please
e-mail helpdesk and include the whole of this message
in your request. Alternatively, you can call them, with
the contents of this message to hand when you call.

At Thu Nov 12 11:12:24 2009 the virus scanner said:
MailScanner: Executable DOS/Windows programs are dangerous in email (3YMH6JJY.exe)
No programs allowed (3YMH6JJY.exe)

Note to Help Desk: Look on the cadamedia
(host.thewebguy.ie) MailScanner in /var/spool/MailScanner/quarantine/20091112 (message 1N8XaY-00070b-B5).
–
Postmaster
Cadamedia
www.cadamedia.ie
****************************

This is a scam, delete the email if you are not expecting a package from DHL,
If it is real expect them to give you a call.

Charity Calendars

Watching Buyer Beware on RTE tonight and interested to see that companies are still using these traditional forms of advertising to promote their businesses, but also saddened to see that companies are exploiting those one who still are. Not every one doing charity calendars, but one company especially who has taken peoples money for advertising space and it turns out that the company are dodgy and the customer has got zero return for investment for the advertising spend they used. I could go on about how there are always more ads than actual practical space for the calender dates and that you can’t use it.

Anyway.

No matter what industry you are in you have to be aware that there are companies out there who will rip you off when it comes to advertising or even getting listed on a web directory for example. Our area of expertise is the Internet. We get many calls all the time from concerned companies who have received an invoice for getting listed in the world web directory or World business Register

€995 per year, 3 year listing!

And its a contract that the company would have signed making them agree to pay €995 per year to get their website listed in some obscure European directory that will bring them in no business. Is it a scam? Well in theory they are offering a service, but i personally think its a scam. In fact we write about it regularly, as we hear so many complaints from companies not under standing if it is the renewal notice for their domain name or from the irish domain registry etc. The program researches for Buyer Beware called our office when they were researching an item about these online scams and we were able to discuss that issue and let them know how were were trying to combat against these online scams.

If you are truly interesting in promoting your business I have to recommend using the latest form of marketing . . . . The Internet. We at Cada Media Ltd are a well established website design and web marketing company based in Gorey and supplying our services and expertise nationwide for the past 10 years. Give myself Dave Jordan a call of you would like to start a campaign to get you company or business noticed.

Well done to the producers of Buyer Beware for promoting this scam.

If you receive an email like the following Delete it. It is a Scam. We have had two clients in the past 4 days, nearly following through with it. Either call your bank to confirm or call us 053 9430748. Banks do not work in their manner and please just delete it.

*****************

Dear Client,

We regret to inform you that your Personal Access Code (PAC) has been locked.

This measure was taken because of several security issues regarding your account.

To unlock your PAC you need to confirm your identity.

If you fail to confirm your identity we will have no choice but to suspend your account.

Previous notifications have been sent.

Copyright Allied Irish Banks p.l.c. 1995

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