Good morning everyone,

Just a quick heads up on a change we're making to our Broadband network to increase customer security.  As per industry best practice we're going to start blocking the ports used for SMB and NetBIOS on our Broadband connections.  Those protocols are fairly well documented to be insecure and should never be used outside your own LAN - i.e. never on the internet.

The specifics of the ports being blocked are:

Incoming TCP ports 135->139

Incoming TCP port 445

This was implemented for Wireless Broadband Static IP nationwide from day 1.  It is now being progressively rolled out across ADSL/VDSL and UFB for Spark Broadband starting with Northland.  We expect to complete the rollout within the next month.

If you have another application which uses these ports, we'd recommend that if possible you move it to using a different port.

If that is not possible you can always opt out of the filtering by following the opt out links at spark.co.nz/port25.  If you get port 25 (SMTP) unblocked it will also unblock the ports above (the same profile blocks all of these ports).

Dave.