Your website is important to you, and so is the uptime. If your website goes down for any reason, of course you want to know. But if you’re not sitting in front of the computer all the time, how do you know if your site goes down? With monitoring services, such as Alertra.

What this service does is it monitors your website by pinging it from different locations around the world. If a problem is encountered, you are notified by phone, SMS, e-mail, pager, or instant message, depending on your preference. If you have a shared account, by the time you’re alerted, we’re probably already fixing it. But if you have a dedicated server, a service such as Alertra can prove to be quite invaluable.

How much you pay per month depends upon how often you want your website pinged, and how many methods of notification you choose. But regardless of how you go about it, it’s a priceless service, because you can be notified of downtime very quickly, which in turn will allow for a quick resolution to the problem.

Alertra is not the only company to offer such a service; other companies such as SiteUpTime, and Uptrends are two of the many companies to offer this sort of service. When it comes to uptime, knowledge is power, and knowing when your site is down, whether it’s the server itself, DNS, or only e-mail, you probably would want to know right away. Companies such as Alertra give you that knowledge, and that peace of mind.

Domain owners receive a email like this.

Asia Network is the company of internet services that the domain

registration is one of the major online style of our service range. Now we have something need to confirm with you.We hope you to cooperate with us.On Aug. 5th 2008,we received an application from one person named “Karl Fischer” who wants to register some domains(designsbyoldcrow.asia designsbyoldcrow.com.cn designsbyoldcrow.eu designsbyoldcrow.info designsbyoldcrow.cn designsbyoldcrow.net).According to our investigation,we found that domain names have relevance to your company’s name and trademark,so we send this email for you to confirm it.We are dealing with this

affair in these days,so we wish to get the confirmation and the assent of your company.If Karl Fischer doesn’t belong to your company and you don’t authorize him to register these domains,Pls contact with me asap in order to prevent some guy from abusing your trademarks and the company names.

In addition,I must declare that we have time limited for one person or one company’s registration.It is just 15 days.If your company has no response to us within the dispute period,we will unconditionally authorized the application of Karl Fischer.In order to deal with this issue better,please let someone who is responsible for trademark or domain name contact me asap.Thank you for your cooperate.

Best Regards,

*Eamonn Young

*Sponsoring Registrar:

Asia Network

Add:UNITS A&B 15/F NEICH TOWER 128 GLOUCESTER RD WANCHAI, HK

Tel: +852 3118 1808

Fax: +852 3065 8189

Email:eamonn@asianetworks.asia

The emails are targeting the owners of the first registered domain name.  They imply that someone is interested in registering all the other country specific extension of your domain name.

Unfortunately a lot of people panic, because they think their actual domain name may be in jeopardy.  In fact when I recived a email like this a few weeks ago that was my first thought.  Someone was trying to register my domain name.  Then I realized that was not possible.

I didn’t start looking into this until a couple of people I knew had also received a similar email

Here are a couple of blog articles that will explain this scam better than I can.  It is a scam.

Trusted MD.com

Fire Trust

You may or may not have heard of the term, “Phishing” (pronounced like “fishing”). Phishing is the act of sending an email pretending to be from an online store or service such as eBay, PayPal, Amazon, major banks, etc.

The format of the email will look very similar to a standard email you would get from such a service. It might even contain the company’s logo. Here’s an example phishing email I received a while back:

PayPal is committed to maintaining a safe environment for its community of customers. To protect the security of your account, PayPal employs some of the most advanced security systems in the world and our anti-fraud teams regularly screen the PayPal system for unusual activity.

We are contacting you to remind you that on 28 September 2006 our Account Review Team identified some unusual activity in your account. In accordance with PayPal’s User Agreement and to ensure that your account has not been compromised, access to your account was limited. Your account access will remain limited until this issue has been resolved.

To secure your account and quickly restore full access, we may require some additional information from you for the following reason:

We have been notified that a card associated with your account has been reported as lost or stolen, or that there were additional problems with your card.

This process is mandatory, and if not completed within the nearest time your account or credit card may be subject for temporary suspension.

To securely confirm your PayPal information please click on the link bellow:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run

We encourage you to log in and perform the steps necessary to restore your account access as soon as possible. Allowing your account access to remain limited for an extended period of time may result in further limitations on the use of your account and possible account closure.

For more information about how to protect your account please visit PayPal Security Center. We apologize for any incovenience this may cause, and we apriciate your assistance in helping us to maintain the integrity of the entire PayPal system.

Thank you for using PayPal!
The PayPal Team

It looks pretty real doesn’t it? Someone who’s not ever experienced receiving an email like this or isn’t very familiar with how PayPal works may fall for it. The email seems harmless and the link even appears to go PayPal.

First and foremost: PayPal, eBay, Amazon, and most likely your bank will not send you such an email if your account was truly compromised. So this is your first clue that the above and similar emails are a phishing attempt.

The link looks real doesn’t it? Take a closer look. Does the link actually go to PayPal?

No, it doesn’t. The link actually goes to http://www.blahblah2.paypal345.blarg.org.com.net/ which is something I just made up. In a real phishing attempt the link may contain the word PayPal (or ebay or your bank, etc) in the URL as this one does, but it’s not really PayPal. Don’t be fooled!

What you’ll be taken to is a site that will look like PayPal, may even look exactly like the PayPal home page, and there will be a form for you to enter your information. Usually it will ask for your account ID, password, credit card number and possibly your social security number. Once you hit submit after filling out the form, that information is collecting by identify thefts who will then use your information to make fraudulent purchases. They will very likely also purchase a web hosting account that will be used for their scam. (They also hack into unsuspecting innocent people’s websites and upload scripts and mailers to send out these notifications and collect data from people who fall for their phishing emails.)

Another clue is these emails usually contain poor grammar and misspelled words. In my example above, take a look at the last paragraph. Most major companies know how to spell, “incovenience” (inconvenience) and “apriciate” (appreciate) and if they don’t they are usually smart enough to run emails they send to their customers through a spell-checker.

When it doubt, never never never click a link you receive in email that states you need to update your PayPal account. Always go to paypal.com, ebay.com or your bank, etc. by typing the address in your browser if you need to update account information. You can always call them as well and see if your account actually does have any issues.

If you receive an email supposedly from PayPal, your bank, etc, telling you there was suspicious activity, or that you need to update your account, if there was an unverified transaction, or anything at all that directs you to click a link to correct the situation, do NOT click the link and input any information. Always always go to the the sites manually. Report the emails you receive to the abuse address for the website/service you are trying to visit. For PayPal it’s spoof@paypal.com. For eBay it’s spoof@ebay.com

For the most part I think the Can Spam Act has been a failure.

When a email spammer inserts outright fraud into the mix, the Feds are going to take another look and possibly go the extra mile to prosecute.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A federal grand jury in Detroit has indicted a Michigan man dubbed the “spam king,” and 10 others, in an international illegal bulk e-mailing and stock fraud scheme, the U.S. Justice Department said on Thursday.
Under the scheme, the group sent spam touting thinly traded Chinese penny stocks, drove up their stock price, and reaped profits by selling the stock at artificially inflated prices, the statement said.

Here are a couple of sites you may find helpful in regard to Internet Fraud.

http://www.ic3.gov/crimeschemes.aspx#item-7

http://www.lookstoogoodtobetrue.com/fraud.aspx