Back in April I wrote that I noticed a huge increase amount of spam on the web design jobs and gigs sections of Craigslist that I subscribe to. It kept getting worse and worse until recently when I noticed that the amount crap was getting lower.
Even though it’s been a pain it the butt I have been pretty faithfully flagging it and have even gone as far as complaining to the email providers, website hosts and domain name registrars of some of the most repeated ads. There are still some new ones and these people probably aren’t the ones posting the spam, but perhaps if the people who buy these services start to hear about it we can cut off the spammers incentive.
There was a very interesting post on Techdirt about this recently. An informative article.
A couple of things happened to me this week that made me say Hmmmmmmm.
I find it interesting how often things happen in groups. Maybe when I’m doing or thinking about an issue I’m just “tuned in” to finding more.
First I got a postcard form my old High School, Taylor Allderdice. They are putting together an Alumni Directory and they want me to give my contact information to a third party company who will catalog it for them.
I’m not sure that I’m in favor of giving my personal information to someone who then plan to sell it back to me. They have a privacy policy that says they will not share it with anyone but alumni, but as we all know privacy policies can be easily changed with the stroke of a keyboard.
That same day I see a post on Bruce Schneier’s blog called Our Data, Ourselves and I thought Wow!
Then, the next day, I met with a Realtor about his site and we got to talking about the MLS. I have written before how I don’t like the MLS. You give them your listings and they sell them back to you. Not only that they make it complicated, secretive, and very expensive. I explained to my potential customer that someone is going to do this better, make it easier and probably free.
The very next day while looking for something else I found Real Estate Search on Google Maps.
To try it yourself go to Google Maps, select your area and click on “Show search options”
Then, Restrict results to: Real Estate and click search.
This could be it!
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
I use Verizon for phone and DSL and have for years. I have been very satisfied with them, but I recently got an email from them that bothers me.
Dear Verizon.com customer,
Thank you for taking the time to update security components of your verizon online account. Because security is a top priority at Verizon, we’ll need you to validate your email address at this time. To do this for your Online Account with User ID ######, you will need the following three digit code:###
Follow this link to input the above three digit code and your User ID and Password: Click Here (link removed)
I am almost certain that this email came from Verizon because I had logged into my account to pay my bill and they wanted to update my security information and then let me know that this email would be coming.
Even though I believe this email to be legitimate it bothers me for several reasons:
- Even though I am 99.9% certain that this email came from Verizon there is still that 0.1%. I couldn’t find anywhere on their site where I could go to this page from a link, before or after I logged in.
- They told me that this email would be coming, but it took several days to actually arrive.
- Most every company that I deal with on the web tells me to never click on a link in an email asking for my personal information.
- What happened to all of the previous communication from Verizon where they told me that they would NEVER ask for my password in an email? I guess they were just kidding.
It seems to me that even if this is a legitimate email, Verizon is making their security worse by actually inviting Phishing Scams from people copying this format.
I live in Pittsburgh PA and have all of my life.
This morning I heard news that The ‘Burgh wants to install cameras everywhere.
Then this afternoon I check the blogs that I like and see Bruce Schneier has posted London’s Security Cameras Don’t Help. There is always lively discussion on his blog.
I hate to see this camera thing coming to be, but they are already on the highways, at traffic lights and I suppose it’s inevitable in this age.
Maybe I’m just nostalgic.
In the end it’s probably going to be Google that does a better job with the technology. They already have Street View.
I believe that there are more proven methods of crime prevention which would make better use of the money.
Although it may be one of those deals where you have to spend the money on this project or lose it, I’m not sure.
I wonder about things like…
What would happen if the system was hacked without detection, from outside or inside and used to commit crimes?
Good movie plot, no?
I have written before about Google Webmaster Help, but I haven’t talked about Google Webmaster Tools. This is a great resource for anyone who owns a website that lets you know many things about how Google sees your site. They give you reports that you can download about how they crawl and index your site. There is information about diagnostics, statistics, links and sitemaps.
Any one of these make it worth signing up for these free tools, but they just added something that makes it a “Must Have” for any site owner/webmaster.
Google used to try their best to contact any webmaster whenever there was a significant problem with their site (hosting malware, etc) and they were in danger of being banned. Unfortunately spammers saw this as an opportunity to send out spoof emails phishing for anything they could get so Google was forced to discontinue this practice.
Now they’ve added a webmaster message center to the webmaster console. So when you log into your account you can instantly see if there is any major problem.
If you haven’t signed up for Google Webmaster Tools yet you should consider doing so right now.
It seems like there is always something new out there that wants to hurt or take over your computer. I don’t usually give virus warnings, but I am going to mention a virus named “peachy” because it’s the first time a virus has been found in a PDF file. If you get an email with a PDF file attached, be sure you know who sent it to you AND make sure they actually sent it intentionally, because peachy sends itself out from an infected computer without the user knowing it. The attachments can have many random names. Right now you have to have Adobe Acrobat installed, not just the free Reader, for your computer to become infected. I’m sure that will eventually change, too.
Virus experts say the risk is low right now, but it’s just one more new thing to worry about. You can learn more about it here:
PDF Virus Factoid
I found an article called “15 Free Security Programs That Work” by Preston Gralla. He covers some good basic tools like virus protection, firewalls, spyware tools, and clean-up tools. They are all free and he reviews them all.
I’ve joined Project Honey Pot. It’s free to join and would encourage you to join also.
Project Honey Pot is a distributed network of decoy web pages website administrators can include on their sites in order to gather information about robots, crawlers, and spiders. They collate data on harvesters, spammers, dictionary attackers, and comment spammers. They make this data available to the members in order for them to protect their websites and inboxes.
Not only that they are actually doing something about Spam…
A company representing Internet users in more than 100 countries today filed a lawsuit in Virginia seeking the identity of individuals responsible for harvesting millions of e-mail addresses on behalf of spammers.
The suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Alexandria on behalf of Project Honey Pot, a service of Unspam Technologies LLC, a Utah-based anti-spam company that consults with private companies and government agencies.
I subscribe to Matt Cutts’ blog and so I wasn’t surprised to read this morning that it was hacked and replaced by a group called “Dark SEO Team”. I’m not sure if all of his pages are gone or not, but it got me to thinking about security and information backup issues. Then just by coincidence I got an e-mail from someone who had almost hired me, but went with someone else. They told me that their webmaster had quit and was “not sure” if he could remember all of their passwords to give them.
Imagine that, your web person leaves you and no one in your organization has a backup of the data or a copy of your passwords! How to fix that is quite the question, but the best solution is not to allow yourself to be put in that position in the first place. Many web designers and developers will offer or insist on doing everything for you. That can be a big problem if they decide to leave and you don’t know what they have done.
Rule 1 - Keep control of your domain name yourself.
In the end it’s all you have. Your domain name host tells the nameservers on the web where to point to when people look for your site. So in the worst case scenario if you can’t get into the host who has your website files you can always buy a new web host put up a new site and have your name servers point there instead.
Rule 2 - Make sure that there is more than one person who knows all of your passwords.
Getting passwords changed without knowing your current one can be a big hassle. Maybe even keep them with your backup information in a secure location.
Rule 3 - Backup, backup, backup
It can be some trouble to backup on a regular basis so if you don’t do this now you should look into one of the many automated solutions that are available. Also you should keep at least one copy in a different location.
Here are some good tips for backing up your data for everyone, not just business owners, from Leo Notenboom on his AskLeo site.
In the past few weeks I have had a couple of people ask me the question “How secure is a wireless network?” I have also seen a couple of posts on Craigslist asking about this. It turns out that most wireless networks are not very secure I just browsed my own wireless utility and found that there were five different networks (besides my own) that I could see from my computer. Two of them had no security at all. Even though I didn’t try I’ll bet that not only could I use their networks and I could probably get into their computers, too. If I had all of the tools handy to me that the bad guys have I’m sure that I could cause some real trouble just by driving down any street with my laptop on.
It turns out there are some simple steps to make your network more secure. Usually when someone asks me I just point them to this post on Daily Wireless. It answers the questions that I had and some that I didn’t even know that I had. It also tells you why these steps are necessary.
The official Web site of Dolphin Stadium, home of Sunday’s Super Bowl XLI, has been hacked and seeded with exploit code targeting two known Windows security flaws. Hundreds of SuperBowl visitors have been affected.
Apparently they have found this bad code in humdreds of websites. It’s a good idea to make sure that your version of Windows is updated.
