We have recently received this email which purports to come from “cbits.co.uk” it does not!

This type of spoofed email is becoming increasingly common in our inboxes, we obviously know we haven’t sent it but clearly should you receive a similar email you could easily believe it was from us.

Do not be tempted to follow the link or open any attachment unless you are 100% confident it is from us, if in doubt give us a call on 0845 619 0461 or email us on from our website www.cbits.net

There are usually some giveaways on such emails, this one for instance “Dear use of the cbits.co.uk mailing service” – our English is normally not that poor.

It also has a link to “iara.nerim.net”, that is nothing to do with cbits

One (somewhat more technical) way to check emails is to view the “headers” or “message source” which is a feature you will find in your email client software

The headers of this message look like this

The return path (Yellow) gives away the fact that this email has used a domain name “revelation-studio.com” as a spoofed return path (revelation-studio.com are almost certainly unaware of this as they look to be fairly God fearing people based in Florida)

The received message ID (red) shows that the email originated from a server called “MOMAHICB” which is located on an IP (Internet Protocol) address 124.43.51.118 which is owned by Sri-Lanka Telecom (not a likely source  for cbits mail)

Our spam filter looked at this message and gave it 160 “points” (purple) 20 for beginning “Dear” (not really used in emails), 50 for the fact that it pretended that it came from the same address as it was going to and 10 for being a very short message This was not enough for it to decide that it is spam but does provide us with some pointers so that any emails we send  do not fall foul of other spam filters.

I hope this give you some ideas of what to beware of, but please if in doubt give us a call

  It has become necessary to put an additional layer of security into our hosted websites, because we have had a couple of instances of sites being “Hi-jacked” (One would you believe on Christmas day – have these people got nothing better to do with their lives?)

What this means is that in order to connect to your site to upload, you will need to login to the Control Panel for your website and “unlock” it so you can use FTP (File Transfer Protocol). You can choose to unlock it for a period of time, and if you only occasionally access your website we recommend you do this (for the minimum amount of time needed).

If however you access the site (or more than one site) quite regularly you have an option to set an unlock by using your external IP address.

We have provided instructions on how to do this on our support pages: here

We recognise that this adds an extra level of hassle, but it is clear that our obligation to protect your websites from hackers etc leaves us no room for manoeuvre.

Thank you for your continued custom.

A number of our cbits.net users are due to be upgraded on Monday 23rd November. We do not have control over exactly when this will happen as the actual switching is done by BT.

In many cases we will handle any changes to settings from our end, however for some users it may be necessary to change the Username and Password which is stored in the router.

If you are involved in this change we will have sent you an email, showing the settings you will need to put into your router, if you experience disconnection and are confident in changing these settings please do so.

In any other event please call us on 0844 504 3662