March 2007

Dear Client,

As part of our integration with our new billing system upgrade, this month we are sending out statements rather than invoices. They contain the same information as before but are true statements—the old system tried combining invoices with statements and didn’t do a very good job with the result. Please review these and if you find anything unexpected, please give us a call.

For those of you who have online shopping carts (whether with us or someone else), here’s some information that you may find useful. If you take credit cards and use automatic processing, ask your card processing company what mechanisms they have in place for detecting fraud.

Here’s what can happen: if your account name and password at the credit card processing company gets compromised, a hacker could run large #s of charges or even authorizations through your account without you knowing about it. Charges would go to your account, but authorizations wouldn’t. An authorization is a way of ‘reserving’ an amount about to be charged on a credit card. Why do this? It verifies that the card is good and has a credit limit that hasn’t been exceeded yet. They can then make new cards with equipment one can purchase and sell them.

One of our clients had this happen to them recently, to the tune of over 80,000 authorizations in a 24 hour period. This was almost one per second. The amount of grief this causes cannot be understated.

At a minimum, you should have a complex username and password for your admin logon to the company. Secondly, they should have automatic monitors in place that look for this type of activity—without you opting in to turn it on.

The tomatoes starts we had last month are doing well. We still have 47 San Marzano seedlings that are about 3-4” tall, about a dozen or so Early Girls, some Tomatillos, and standard Romas. And we have about 45 habanero pepper plants. If those do well, I’ll be slicing and drying them and making a potent chili powder. We’ll see!

Sincerely,

Ben Conner