Starting January 2nd 2012, Quilnet Solutions will end paper-based billing and begin billing thru credit card. Many of our customers have enjoyed the option of receiving 30 days before payment of paper-based billing was due. We would like to take the opportunity to re-assure customers that the 30 day “grace period” will remain for customers. Currently, we send a paper bill by mail to customers a day after service is performed. Customers then return payment by check or money order within 30 days to Quilnet Solutions. Starting January 2nd, 2012, Quilnet Solutions will no longer send out paper bills by mail to customers. Instead, customers which require 30 days to pay will be asked to provide a credit card. Customers will then be given to option to specify a date, not exceeding 30 days from the day of service, before the credit card is processed. Quilnet Solutions will not process payments against credit cards until the date agreed upon by the customer. This only effects Onsite Technical Support (OTS) services and IT Solutions.

Customers may continue to provide payments as COD by cash, check, money order, or credit card. Customers will no longer be able to request a paper bill for the purpose of payment. Any payment that is not made the same day as the service is provided (billed) must be paid for by credit card. Customers which require a paper copy of their bill for their records may request one as usual.

New customers purchasing managed or hosted services will be required to provide payment using a credit card. Paper-based billing will not be provided to new customers.

Existing customers using managed or hosted services may continue to receive paper-based billing as they always have, per their agreement. Customers that would like to switch to credit card billing may do so at any time by contacting your account representative, however, once you are switched to credit card billing, you may not return to paper billing at a later date.

We understand some customers may be confused or concerned about these changes. We are here to help you understand these changes or address your concerns. Give us a call and we will help you in any way we can.

These changes are being made for a few reasons. First, this will allow us to continue providing the highest level of services and support to our customers. In addition, with the removal of paper billing we are reducing our paper consumption and waste which is good for the environment. This reduction of paper is part of our green initiative. By providing customers the option of paying by credit card, we are giving you more freedom in how you pay for your services.

We are excited to provide credit card billing to our customers and believe this will help us provide better customer satisfaction.

Credit card processing is provided by Merchant Services and processed through First Data Global Gateway.

From the beginning, I promised to devote Quilnet Solutions as a resource to the community, not in the since of the technical services it provides, but to become a brand name that everyone, and I mean everyone, in the community would associate as a community provider, that is, providing the community with the things it needs. Providing money and resources to those who need it. I’m not talking about technical resources. I mean helping a child in the hospital, or the mother who can’t afford the things she needs to live. It’s about the teenager who dreams of college but cannot afford it. Quilnet Solutions will provide to the needs of the community.

Quilnet Solutions has been a part of many technological and industry changes in the last 5 years. It has been amazing to see the world today, as opposed to 5 years ago, when I first started this company. In 2012, we will also see great change in the company.

My expectations of Quilnet Solutions in 2012 includes

• The expansion of services and growth
• Job Creation
• Provide Community Resources and Aid
• Continued High Quality Products and Services
• Continue Instilling Customer Priority over Financial Gains
• Increase Branding Awareness and Public Perception
• Shape Public Understanding of Brand’s Values and Goals

2012 will also be the year where Quilnet Solutions returns to the Christian Blue Pages as it’s primary advertising platform. We will begin shaping the values and goals of Quilnet Solutions and what we stand for.

Quilnet Solutions will begin it’s journey next year into being the company I wanted it to become since the beginning. It’s taken 5 years to finish the foundation and the framework for which this company would be built and run on, but we are here. The very fabric of this company has always been, and will continue to always be built around what God has in design for Quilnet Solutions. God is the very core of this company, and as it has been every year for the last 5 years, God will remain in control over this company. YOU HAVE MY WORD…

Phillip Frabott    - Owner of Quilnet Solutions

In our Green Initiative we have found ourselves beyond where we expected to be. Our Green Initiative is expected to be at 100% no later then Q4 of 2013. As of Q4 2011, we are at 92%. This is huge! Our initial expectations for Q4 2011 were around 75%. We are well beyond this.

The Vision for Quilnet Solutions during 2011 has changed. Personally, I have found real understanding of what God’s design for Quilnet Solutions is and the direction He wants us to go moving forward. Our vision is to impact the lives of everyone we meet, see, talk to, and work with. To impact the lives of the community in ways that even we cannot understand. Without impacting lives, Quilnet Solutions fails. Our success is in changing lives.

The Focus for Quilnet Solutions has not changed. We believe that the success in Quilnet Solutions resides in our focus being on the customer, not on money. Money means nothing if you find it consuming your focus away from the customer. Our success is won by the customer, not money. Quilnet Solutions will continue operating with our focus 100% on the customer as we move into 2012. You are the spotlight.

Quilnet Solutions has seen Change during 2011. Change that has allowed us to grow. Business and industry is always changing and Quilnet Solutions must be agile during change. We are succeeding in this regard.

Innovation has been a key booster for Quilnet Solutions. Many things have happened in the industry this year that has allowed us to continue innovating. Proliferation of new devices such as tablets and slates (iPad, Droid Tablets, HP WebOS, etc.), Smartphones (Windows Phone 7, Droid, etc.), and new innovative devices such as Xbox Kinect, the cloud and other exciting technologies, have appeared this year, allowing us to build amazing products and services. In 2012 innovation will continue to be a top technology priority for Quilnet Solutions, especially with the release of Windows 8 OS and Windows 8 slates expected to release next year. It is truly an exciting time for Quilnet Solutions.

2011 has been amazing. We are sad to see it leave but we are excited for what 2012 will become. Quilnet Solutions is ready to embark on the 2012 journey and we are excited to see you come with us! Enjoy the holiday season and we will see you all next year!

Have a Merry Christmas and an amazing New Year!

We are excited to provide this service to our customers. We feel this will benefit our customers greatly and provide them with more freedom when receiving services from Quilnet Solutions.

Credit and Debit card processing will begin January 2nd 2012.

We wanted to notify our customers and viewers of a security risk that is currently out there on the internet. We normally allow security providers, such as Microsoft, McAfee or Symantec, make these announcements but due to the nature of this risk, and the fact that it is actively being used by malicious users, we thought it necessary to let you know directly.

48 hours ago it was announced that there were active attacks being pursued online using fraudulent digital certificates which were issued by DigiNotar. DigiNotar is a certificate authority which provides customers with digital certificates. These fraudulent certificates affect all users of the internet, regardless of the Operating System in use.

According to the information we have, the following certificates are known as fraudulent:

• DigiNotar Root CA
• DigiNotar Root CA G2
• DigiNotar PKIoverheid CA Overheid
• DigiNotar PKIoverheid CA Organisatie – G2
• DigiNotar PKIoverheid CA Overheid en Bedrijven

What is a Digital Certificate?

A digital certificate, or just certificate for short, is a data file that is used to encrypt information. For example, when you connect to a bank web site, you might be connecting over SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and your information, such as bank account number or password, is encrypted using a digital certificate. This keeps attackers from being able to steal information while it’s being transmitted over the internet because they cannot decrypt the information without being the actual bank server.

What is a Digital Certificate Authority?

A Digital Certificate Authority, also known as just Certificate Authority or CA, is a Digital Certificate provider that generates digital certificates and hands them out to customers. Your bank will receive a digital certificate by purchasing one from a Digital Certificate Authority. In order for digital certificates to function, it requires the bank to have a “private key:”, used to decrypt information, a “public key” used to encrypt information, and an available Digital Certificate Authority to authenticate any certificates. When you access the bank web site, the web site will tell your computer that it has a certificate. Your computer must then contact the Digital Certificate Authority in order to receive encryption information (“public key”) so it can talk to the bank web site. the Digital Certificate Authority insures that no one is able to hijack a digital certificate.

Steps to Protect

Users of Windows, including Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 (including both R2 and non-R2 releases), as well as users of Macintosh and Linux/Unix are affected.

In order for users to protect themselves from these fraudulent digital certificates, the following steps are necessary:

Windows XP

• Open Internet Explorer
• Visit the following web site: http://update.microsoft.com.
• Click the “Express” button when the option is made available.
• Follow the prompts to complete the installation of any new Microsoft updates

Windows Vista/Windows 7

• Click Start > Control Panel
• Click System and Security
• Click Windows Update
• Choose Check for Updates on the left
• Click the ‘Install Updates’ button.

(If the ‘Install Updates’ button isn’t available, then you may already have this update installed)

Macintosh/Linux/Unix

Check for any new System updates for your respective operating systems.

Macintosh users can contact Apple Product support for more information on how to protect against these attack vectors

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Depending on the type of device you have, Smart phones and MP3 players may also be affected. iPod, iPhone, Android, PalmOS, Blackberry. Users of these devices should contact the manufacturer’s technical support to insure these devices are protected.

Microsoft has already announced that Windows Mobile 6.x, Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) devices are already protected and not affected by this risk.

So, what does this all mean for Quilnet Solutions, who provides top quality onsite support for customers?

Honestly, not much. We’ve known about these changes for a few years now. It’s nothing new for us. In fact, we welcome these new devices into the marketplace with open arms. It will unleash information into more hands anywhere, using any device.

How does Quilnet Solutions Onsite technical support services mesh with these new devices, especially if they will one day replace desktop systems?

We do not feel that desktops are going away overnight. It will be a transitional thing, although a very fast transition. Quilnet Solutions OTS will not suffer from this change. In fact, it will open the door for more opportunities to reach our customers and provide them with top quality support to these new players in the market. Our OTS services will migrate into this new field. Primarily, our OTS service handles more software-based service calls then it does hardware. Yes, we do have hardware failures and handle these easily, but most of our customers, over 60% call regarding software and operating system problems, these new devices will provide us with new experiences and opportunities to help our customers, without any loss to the OTS service.

What does the HP pullout mean for the industry and Quilnet Solutions?

I was very surprised when I heard about this. For those who don’t know, HP, the leading vendor of computer systems in the industry decided to end the sale of their line of PC’s, including desktops and laptops. This decision came after HP dropped their WebOS tablet device. We don’t know if this PC move was due to them cancelling the WebOS tablet or not. It actually means a lot for the industry. Keep in mind that HP had about 60% of the sales of PC’s. That’s not going to go unnoticed. However, I feel that this is the first step into tablet and slate devices taking over the industry. This will definitely put a dent in PC sales and will move tablets and slates into the center stage. Quilnet Solutions is very agile. We will dynamically shift with the industry as it changes.

Quilnet Solutions is very excited about this and we look forward to continuing our top of the line onsite technical support services to the customer supporting these new devices. I know our development team is very excited to have new devices to “play with” and I’m sure will be producing amazing tablet, slate, and smartphone applications in the next year or so.

Why did you wait to merge IPv6 to the www.* address?

Basically, we wanted to be sure everything was working correctly before we enable IPv6 records on the www.* address. If something went wrong, we wanted to be able to fix it easily, while still providing services to the existing IPv4 network.

What services are IPv6 Enabled?

Currently, we are limiting access to IPv6 to our public web site. Customers interested in accessing our web site using IPv6 can do so by going to http://ipv6.quilnet.com. We will continue servicing IPv4 customers at http://www.quilnet.com. In the future we will merge IPv4 and IPv6 access to http://www.quilnet.com.

Why wait to merge IPv6 to the www.* address?

Basically, we want to be sure everything is working correctly before we enable IPv6 records on the www.* address. If something goes wrong, we will be able to fix it much easier, while still providing services to the existing IPv4 network.

Will Hosted Services be accessible from IPv6?

At the moment, no. We are only providing IPv6 services to our public web site. Hosted services will not be IPv6 enabled. However, we will enable IPv6 for hosted services in the future.

Will Managed Services be accessible from IPv6?

At the moment, no. We are only providing IPv6 services to our public web site. Managed services will not be IPv6 enabled. However, we will enable IPv6 for managed services in the future.

How are you providing IPv6 support?

At this time, our IPv6 services are provided through a 6to4 tunnel. Once we receive native IPv6 support from our ISP, we will disable 6to4 tunneling and enable native IPv6.

Two of the five major technologies we use every day is SharePoint and Exchange. This year, we upgraded to SharePoint 2010 and soon after, upgraded to Exchange 2010. These upgrades allowed us to maintain a very high rate of return for the investment. It allowed us to maintain better collaboration which our customers as well as maintain better communications. It increased our productivity, almost 30%. That’s a lot when you bring it down to brass tacks.

We began evaluating Microsoft Office 365 to replace our on-premise systems for SharePoint and Exchange during the 1st quarter of 2011. During this time, we determined that it would be in our best interest to consider this technology, as we were looking to offload our SharePoint system. This would allow us to have increased productivity as our current resources allocated to SharePoint were underperforming, due to the amount of work we demand from our systems. After the official release of Office 365, we began evaluating Exchange. Now, I must be honest here, I wasn’t looking forward to this. Why? Well, email is one of those things I take pride in maintaining myself. It’s a personal thing for me. I can deal without the internet, without Facebook, even without Instant Messaging. But take my email away and it’s like some part of me is missing. How can another company do as well of a job as I can with *MY* email? It was a tough thing for me to let go of, however, it has turned out to be a great decision. It has increased my productivity, not handling nearly as much junk mail as I used to, and allows me to have email support during maintenance or downtime on the server.

Office 365 manages 2 of the 5 major services we use on a daily basis, and allows us to provide better services and solutions to our customers by making us faster to respond to situations, increases collaboration and communication, and allows us to have much higher productivity. In addition, I save time but not having to maintain these 2 systems myself. It has allowed me to re-allocate my time to more important things in my business. This is one of the best ROI moves I have made for this company.

Quilnet Solutions will continue to evaluation new and exciting technologies, and will expect more and more of the cloud in the future!

Today another company has added themselves to a the list of hacked companies which has been increasing at a fast rate since the beginning of April. Quilnet Solutions, today, received word that the gaming company called Codemasters was hacked, confirming that customer information had in fact been compromised.

Codemasters is one of several companies recently attacked by the hacking community.

UPDATE: Bioware has added themselves to the list of victims on June 23rd 2011.

When did it all start?

It started back in April during a community gathering among hackers where they provide and share information on compromises in security systems with each other. A group of hackers managed to figure out how to attack a specific type of security system. Their first target would be The Sony Playstation Network (PSN). Their attacks against PSN were successful and they managed to steal customer account information, including credit and debit card information. Sony Online Entertainment (SOE), Sony’s PC version of the Playstation Network was also compromised at the same time, as these two systems are tied together. The information that was stolen not only provided the hackers with enough information for credit card fraud but also provided them with information they needed for identity theft. Sony is providing services to it’s customers who’s identity may have been compromised.

What happened next?

Shortly after PSN and SOE were hacked, Amazon.com determined there was an intrusion into their network as well. After this attack, Microsoft began preventative maintenance on their security systems by doing internal and external testing on their security systems to determine any level of compromise they may have had. While we do not have any information on the results of their testing, to date, there has not been any known intrusion into Microsoft’s datacenters or information networks. On June 5th, Nintendo announced their systems had been compromised, luckily, no customer information had been taken. On June 10th, Codemasters had announced that their networks had been infiltrated and customer information had in fact been stolen from their networks. Credit and Debit card information, however, were not taken.

How did this happen?

Back in March, a group of hackers found a hole in the security systems of RSA, one of the leading and most secure system security firms in the world. RSA is used by many large corporations as well as governments. Currently, some systems within the US government use RSA. The hackers managed to infiltrate the RSA system and steal complex security codes. These codes would later be used in the attacks against the companies mentioned above. At the same time that RSA was being attacked, Google’s Gmail service was being attacked, providing the hackers with access to Gmail passwords. This allowed them to access sensitive facilities and information.

Is everyone at risk?

It would seem that RSA is the key to these attacks. Any system using the compromised security codes that were stolen from RSA would allow the attackers to gain access to their systems. So far, attackers have been focused on companies which providing gaming services to their customers, with the exception of Amazon.com. However, a bigger concern is the fact that many banks across the US are using RSA for security. That being said, it’s important to know that very few banks allow their money database infrastructure to connect to the internet so short of someone hacking a computer from within the bank building itself, financial information should be safe.

Why are some people protected from these attacks?

Well, that’s an easy answer. Not everyone uses RSA for security. There are some companies that use other types of security systems. In addition, some companies have proprietary security systems which they built themselves. Microsoft is an example of one of these companies. They have proprietary security systems which do not use any 3rd party security systems. They would not be exposed to attacks using RSA because no RSA security is being used.

Is Quilnet Solutions at risk?

No. Quilnet Solutions does not use RSA in any of it’s systems. We monitor our information and access systems carefully. We have very strict password policies and our staff is trained in information security.

What should I do?

It’s important to understand that just because these attacks have occurred against gaming services, it does not mean that it is limited to gaming services. Other services, such as email, banking, online shopping, cellular and wireless services and other RSA based services may be at risk. The best thing for you, as a customer, to do is insure you change your passwords frequently. Quilnet Solutions recommends customers change passwords every 60 days, especially for key services they use. Don’t think that “if a hacker got into this account it wouldn’t really matter that much” because it’s not about what they can do with the account, it’s what information does the account provide. All they need is your name, address, and telephone number and they have everything they need for identity theft. Most companies today, when you create a new account, will ask for this information. Keep an eye on your email. Companies that find themselves compromised will tend to contact their customers by email. If you receive these emails be sure to follow any instructions they provide. If your credit or debit card information has been compromised, contact your bank or credit card provider to determine what they recommend for compromised cards. Keep an eye on your credit scores. These can help you determine if your identity has been stolen and will allow you to take appropriate action.