21 February 2014 – Recommended FRITZ!Box firmware upgrade

Recently the German manufacturer AVM released a firmware upgrade for their FRITZ!Box modems because of reported hacking attempts on this type of modems. Hackers could break into the modem and call via the customer’s VoIP number. AVM confirmed reported cases in Germany and in The Netherlands.

Meanwhile AVM communicated that they collaborate closely with the authorities to catch the hackers. A new firmware upgrade should do the trick to block future hacking attempts. The reported cases concerned all models and AVM provided an upgrade for over more than 40 distributed models (http://www.avm.de/en/Sicherheit/update_list.html).

Edpnet needs to protect her FRITZ!Box users as well. We can confirm that we received some complaints of customers who noticed something ‘abnormal’. Therefor we insist on executing the firmware upgrade as soon as possible. All FRITZ!BOX users will receive a ticket with the necessary instructions.

If you do not want to wait for this ticket, please find an online explanation how to start up this firmware upgrade via http://www.avm.de/de/Service/FRITZ_Clips/start_clip.php?clip=fritz_clip_firmware_update_en

19 February 2014 - Telephony issue

Update 15:25
We have restarted our systems, everything is back up and running. We are looking into the cause with our supplier.

Dear customers,

Since 2:30 we are having a problem with Voip and SIP trunks, including our own telephone systems. We are currently not or difficult to reach via telephone.

Our network team is currently trying to resolve this issue as soon as possible.

More news will follow.

17 February 2014

Update 18/02/2014 - 13h45
While not responding to tickets or mails from our NOC team, Spamhaus did respond on one of our Tweets. We didn't get an official confirmation via email from Spamhaus, but it seems that our range isn't listed anymore. We can see that we had green light on http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/latest/ We will do some testings and we advize you to do this as well. It can take a couple of hours before the entire internet is up to date of the deblocking of our range. From the moment that Spamhaus confirmed to us officially, we will update our blog again.

Update 18/02/2014 - 10h15

1 listing remains which needs to be acknowledged by Spamhaus. (After acknowledgement Spamhaus will deblock our IP range as soon as they are willing to do so). As said before, Spamhaus blocks entire IP ranges of ISP, instead of 1 specific IP address or range of the spammer. This is a drastic decision, but as an independant organisation, they set their own rules and procedures. And in this way they often have internet service providers in an unwanted stranglehold. Nevertheless we always have good communication with Spamhaus. We are very sorry for the inconveniences.

Update 17/02/2014 - 16h47
12 individual spamhaus listings are blocked. 8 are acknowledged by Spamhaus. We are waiting for the last 4 listings remaining. After we surely hope Spamhaus can deblock our entire IP range.

Dear customer,

Spamhaus.org listed our IP ranges, due to 2 customers who seems to be spammers. Meanwhile our NOC team took the necessary steps to block these spammers, but you are unable to send mails to people who use spamhaus.org as a filter to receive e-mail.

As we already communicated in the past, spamhaus.org always take extreme measurments by blocking entire IP ranges, instead of the one specific spamming IP address.

As an ISP we do not do any filtering of traffic and we do allow fixed IP users to have their own mail servers, but we try to pro-actively scan as much traffic as we can for possible abuse. We already redefined our policy regarding traffic filtering to prevent such issues, but it seems now that we need to protect ourselves and our customers even more.

We still believe that over the years we already took quite a lot of measurements to get the internet free from abuse and spam as we closed port 25 for all our dynamic IP users and we implemented a state of the art Cisco Iron Port mail system.
Nevertheless we still do not do any traffic filtering and we don't want to.

We are in contact with Spamhaus.org in order to delist our IP-ranges as soon as possible.

14 February 2014 - Planned Maintenance

We have planned a scheduled maintenance on our mail servers tonight at 00:00 CET. The maintenance will last 30 minutes.

Our network engineers will replace the battery backup units on our data storage servers.

During the maintenance our mail servers will not be reachable. No email will be lost.

We apologize for any inconvenience

Update 1 - 17/02/2014 09:00
The maintenance has been completed. The mailserver is operational again.