Even my sister can hack Altec telecoms

A few days ago, my sister’s boyfriend, who is currently in the army in some far away island, wanted to change the DNS settings on his domain, because his hosting provider changed DNS servers. Not being very knowledgable in these things he had given the registrar a contact email on his domain, which meant he couldn’t get the verification-code he needed to login and do the changes.

He called my sister and told her to fax them , telling them to change the contact email address on his domain. My sister popped-up MS Word and wrote a letter without contact details, just the company name, and asked them to do the changes. Sure enough they sent an email with the verification-code …. for a different company. Apparently anyone can send any piece of paper, no matter how awful, asking them for the verification code of any domain, and the automatons over at Altec Telecoms will happily oblige.

Besides the obvious security issue, i must comment on their service level. My sister would keep contacting them for two days, being given from representative to representative to technical staff, to sales staff, to the janitor and ‘whoever-would-be-walking-besides-a-ringing-telephone’. At some point she got mad and asked the lady she was speaking with about her name. The lady, which identified heslef as ‘Papadopoulou’ told my sister to ‘fuck off’ while hunging up. Probably though my sister had not head me. Upon hearing this i tried to call them and complain to some supervisor, but i was put on hold for more than five minutes (their way of telling me…. ‘fuck off, too’ i guess) and i hang up.

I wish i could say that Altec Telecoms is alone in being such a horrible pain to deal with, but my own ISP, Forthnet, has been just a evil…