Recently No-IP has disabled all dns updates from D-Link routers to our main website www.no-ip.com. Over the past 3 years No-IP has supported the ability of these routers to perform updates to our dynupdate.no-ip.com host. We also allowed updates for people that incorrectly configured their router to point at www.no-ip.com. Unfortunately, traffic from these routers constitutes 50% of the requests our website receives and actions must be taken to reduce the impact from these misconfigured routers.

If you are using a D-Link router as your update client, please verify that your “Server Address” is dynupdate.no-ip.com and NOT www.no-ip.com. Also take the time to verify you still have the correct email address for the username and correct password and are running the most recent version of firmware for your router.

Users currently performing updates through www.no-ip.com will receive a “too many updates” error response. Adding salt to the wound, older D-Link routers do not listen to response codes (hence the insane amount of traffic) so at some point in the future we may begin blocking these at the connection level.

More information on configuring your D-Link router can be found over here.

A recent batch of malware has been targeted at users of the Skype VOIP phone service. Apparently the malware made use of a No-IP hostname (nsdf.no-ip.biz). No-IP received notification of this early on the 18th and promptly disabled the account and DNS host of the user that developed the malware. All logs related to this users account have been preserved and will be handed over to law enforcement for prosecution. More information regarding this Skype virus can be read at The Register and over at F-Secure and Symantec.

Please note that you should never click on suspicious links or run executables (.exe files) from unknown sources. Also, please be sure to update your virus scanning software frequently and run it often.

Earlier today ordb.org announced that it is discontinuing the Open Relay Database. The maintainers have moved on noting that blocking open relays just isn’t what it used to be. For No-IP Anti-spam Policies, this was a default list for the Aggressive, Strong, and Moderate presets. It has been removed from these as well as domains that had it as a customized selection. We are sorry to see ORDB go, but we look forward to what new enterprises their loosed time shall beget.

The success of the Anti-spam Policies addition has been staggering. Spam and spam scores are down an almost inconceivable amount. Customer’s inboxes are cleaner and so are ours! Reflector and Backup MX users should see better relay times when they have been offline for awhile due to the smaller queues (70% smaller!). We are currently blocking over one MEEHLLIAHN spam messages per day on mail1.no-ip.com alone, and that doesn’t even include what is filtered with greylisting. This has been a win for everyone, so thanks for putting up with our dust during the transition!

As time goes on we’ll be adding more options to the policies list. To get the ball rolling we’ve added the NJABL. This is an excellent list that is used in part by the Spamhaus XBL. It provides further protection with over 115MB of IP addresses! It is now part of the default for Aggressive and Strong presets. And for those pop3 users who do not enable NJABL, we’ve added custom spam scoring to this new list. The added score should help flag any spam that makes it through the Anti-spam Policies system and aids your local filters in keeping the bad messages out of your way. So read about the NJABL and start using it!