We are happy to announce that our support page has been replaced with a new customer portal. All the information that was originally contained on the support page has been moved to the customer portal. This gives us a better way to service our clients. All support information and plus our helpdesk have been combined to better serve you. There is a knowledge base in this new area with a knowledge base search engine, links to the most popular tutorials, plus a news column where we can update you on some of the changes maintainance schedules, etc. When you submit a work request in the new system you will be able to respond via email if you are a registered user. There are many new features which you should check out when you have the time. Those having accounts in our old system will have to create new ones here. The new system requires an email verification to activate your account.

 ~Ellen Kozel
CEO, Badger Web Hosting

In December, a BBB accredited business located in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin had its identity stolen by a scam company. The scammers created a web address that was very similar to the real company's web address, and then put the real company's physical address as its own address on this bogus website.

Once unhappy consumers were unable to get ahold of the "customer service" representatives at the fake company, they used the address on the fake company's website to find an alternate telephone number.  That's when the real company began receiving phone calls from the scam company's customers. In essence, the real company's name was "hijacked" by scammers. Fortunately, the real company notified the BBB, who worked to have the bogus website shutdown.

The Wisconsin BBB is warning businesses that this could happen to you! If your company has a website, you should regularly search for your company's name, address and telephone number on the internet. You may be surprised at what you find!

If you discover that your company's name has been hijacked, contact law enforcement officials and the
BBB.

The Wisconsin BBB is warning its accredited business members about a company called OYP (online yellow pages) Group, located in Plattsburgh, New York. The company has more than 500 complaints and an unsatisfactory rating with the Upstate New York BBB office.  According to a Wisconsin BBB accredited business, OYP Group mails to businesses what looks like a collections notice for an advertisement in an online yellow pages-type directory. The only problem is...the company didn't place an ad! If you have a problem with this company, be sure to file a complaint with the BBB.

The Utah BBB in Salt Lake City recently issued a warning about Origin3, a web developer located in Salt Lake City. This company has an unsatisfactory record with the BBB due to unanswered complaints.  It appears that this company was taking money -- between $450 and $4800 -- to develop a company's website, and then not delivering.

Complaints have come from 15 different states, including Wisconsin.  If you want to hire a vendor to provide your company with a product or service, make sure you check out the company's reliability on the Better Business website -- www.wisconsin.bbb.org.

We have updated our anti-virus protection software on all email accounts on our servers. Although we supply anti-virus software on our servers, we recommend that all users purchase and keep updated anti-virus protection on their workstations.

~Ellen Kozel, CEO/Owner

Over the past few weeks our clients may have notices a considerable amount of spam no longer reaching their mailboxes. We've added an additional level of spam control to our system which has proven to be very effect. Although we may never be able to eliminate spam all together, we strive hard to keep our email system as pure as possible.

~Ellen Kozel, CEO/Owner

Through the evening we changed the look and feel of our sites. We have streamlined our processes to ease the purchase of services. Many pages have been moved, eliminated or consolidated to make things easier for the buyer. Additional services are now located at the bottom of each page. The new look and feel is in place for our commercial and non-profit sites and our email site will change shortly after some final testing. Our email site will now offer personal email accounts not requiring a domain along with our commercial purchases. We've installed a brand new helpdesk, which is in it's first version which will in the near future add functionality to serve our clients better.

~Ellen Kozel, CEO/Owner

~Reprint from Techworld.com

~Article by John E. Dunn, Techworld

YouTube is again being used to distribute malware, this time a variant of the nuisance Zlob adware.

According to Secure Computing, attackers are using a fake video link on the site to initiate infection with the Trojan, which bombards its victims with porn adware, before installing data-stealing code.

What makes matters worse is that the only defence against such attacks on the popular video-hosting website is the diligence of YouTube’s security personnel, who can remove attacks as soon as they find them. However, according to Secure’s Paul Henry, this still gives the malware distributors a window of opportunity of at least hours.

“The fact is, no one expects to find malware hidden in YouTube files. Yet the medium’s popularity is highly alluring as a mass distribution vehicle for malicious code. What’s alarming is that - from a security perspective - many users and organisations will be blindsided and potentially seriously exposed,” he said. “Hackers look at cost of ownership. On YouTube it [the period of opportunity] is half a day.”

The trend to compromise legitimate websites to distribute malware was the latest frontier for criminals, with a string of well-known sites having been hacked in recent times, he said. YouTube’s allure was its massive and trusting user base, which cuts across every demographic.

Secure’s solution was for companies to invest in ‘reputation services’ such Secure Computing’s own, TrustedSource. Equally, companies might choose just to block access to YouTube.

YouTube-related hacks are nothing new. Last November, one appeared on MySpace that posed as a video from the site, but which turned out to be a similar malware scam to the Zlob hack without actually using the site itself.

More recently, hacks hosted on the site itself have started appearing, or using the promise of a YouTube video as bait.

One researcher even claimed to have uncovered a nest of vulnerabilities on the site, none of which YouTube’s owners, Google, had been willing to discuss until he threatened to go public.

There will be a brief outage on Thursday May 17th to upgrade some of the hardware in our system. This work will be done in the evening to minimize impact to our commercial users. During this time websites or email may not be unavailable to our clients. We expect the outage for any one service to be no more than 20 to 30 minutes. These outages are to increase performance of our existing equipment.

~Your Support Team

Badger Web Hosting

Badger Web Hosting is proud to announce that we'll be upgrading our servers this coming month. We will try to do the upgrades with as minimum down time as possible during none peak hours. What this means to our customers is better performance and more reliability. As we move your account from one server to the other we will conduct tests to insure integerity and no loss of data. Individual account holders will be notified of the date and time of the move.

The new servers will provide better performance, and a more stable environment for our clients. We will post to our blog as well as these moves take place.

~Ellen Kozel

CEO/Owner

Today we added a new website http://www.badgerwebhosting.org  to our family. Badgerwebhosting.org will be exclusively for non-profit organizations to purchase services from our company. It will require them to send us a copy of their 501(c)3 certificate to allow them to purchase at discounted rates. This is another way Badger Web Hosting supports our non-profits.

~Ellen Kozel

Owner/CEO