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Choosing the Right Online Backup Service – A SPN Exclusive Article

By Lou Lynch in Featured

Online backup services, such as SOS Online Backup, Carbonite and Mozy, fill a definite need by making the prevention of data loss, affordable, automatic and secure. To use one of these services, you must install software on your computer to scan the hard drive for every file that you want to back up. When you do, the files are compressed and encrypted, and the information is uploaded to servers, which located at multiple data centers with military-grade security.

Choosing Your Service

This depends on much more than the annual fee involved. Start by considering how the service chooses – or allows you to choose – what will be backed up. Generally speaking, most of them will automatically select your Mac user or Windows my document folders. In most cases, you can fine-tune these choices by using a window containing a file directory tree and a folder. It also has check boxes to indicate the files and folders you want to back up.

What You Can Do

Some services also provide additional choices with the right-click menu, including backing up, deleting or restoring files in your online backup set. In addition, every service installs a system tray icon, which enables you to launch the browser that acts as its interface or to access the program window. With this icon, you should be able to begin a restore or backup at once.

Along with the encryption most services use when they store files on their servers, many of them will also allow you to be the only one who has the password protecting those files, and it cannot be accessed by their employees.

Your Main Choices

There are two types of online backup service that are commonly used. With scheduled backup, by using the service’s software, you decide when you want the required processing and uploading to be done, overnight in most cases. Conversely, you may be looking for continuous backup, and certain services, including SOS Online backup and Editors’ Choice, provide a hybrid of both methods. This allows the user to determine what individual files should be monitored continuously and backed up when any changes are made.

With a scheduled backup, the entire bandwidth of your internet connection will be left to you when it is not in use, while a continuous service will necessarily siphon off some of your bandwidth. However, if continuous backup is your main concern, a service like Carbonite or Backblaze is exactly what you need.

Finally, note that any sizeable backup can take a substantial amount of time, perhaps even weeks, to upload several gigabytes, and will vary with the speed of your online connection at the start. After that, your service will only have to upload the parts of a file that have changed, and subsequent backups will be much less time-consuming.

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Lou Lynch is a seasoned technology professional currently working in online education. For more from Lou our his team of education writers visit College.com or look for his articles right here on sitepronews.com

Social Networking and the Overshare Generation

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

There have been a lot of stories in the media lately about cyber-stalking and privacy issues on the Internet. It seems to be a knee jerk reaction to the tsunami of social networking that has occurred in the past few years. Or is it? Are the media over-reacting? Or have we forgotten what privacy is in the age of the World Wide Web?

The Rise of Oversharing

Back in the late 1990′s, many people didn’t even use their real names on the Internet. Email addresses were usually aliases or nicknames in an attempt to retain as much privacy as possible. But with the rise in popularity of social media services such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace has come a rise in online confidence.

The new Internet generation doesn’t seem to have the privacy hang ups or suspicions their parents had about sharing information with strangers over the net. In fact, this younger generation of cyber savvy has an alarmingly high comfort level when it comes to communicating personal information about their lives on the Web.

The premise is that everyone in your social circle not only wants to know but NEEDS to know when you are buying that tall frappuccino from @starbucks. That they need to know precisely where you are and what you are doing every minute of the day. This new phenomenon is called oversharing and it has privacy experts worried.

Are Your Websites Secure Or Is The Back Door Wide Open?

By Willie Crawford in Featured

One of the topics that all of us online business people are aware of but usually don’t feel totally on top of is website security.

Coming from a background of having spent over 20 years in the U.S. military, and having spent four years as a software tester, I have a greater awareness of the need for continuous vigilance in this area than your average marketer.

I also know that you can never make your websites or your computers completely secure. Instead, you can only do things that reduce the risk.

Given that you spend a lot of time, money, and energy, building your online business, it only makes sense that you set aside time periodically to review security related issues, and to look for problems that can be easily minimized.

Here are a few easy “fixes” that you can implement today that will increase the security of your online business.

1) Delete outdated scripts that you no longer use from your server. Many of “the bad guys” have studied the exact same scripts that you use to power your websites, and they know where the backdoors and vulnerabilities are. They know exactly which file will allow them to create all kinds of havoc.

If you have old programs on your server that you are not using, simply delete them.

2) Update older scripts that you are using. Often, the reason that updates are released for a script IS to patch a vulnerability that the developer has become aware of.

YES, upgrading can seem time consuming, and it can be tempting to skip an update, and just wait for the next one. When you wake up one day and can’t access your server, or all of your websites have been defaced or erased, you’ll see the wisdom in ALWAYS keeping the scripts powering your websites completely updated.

If you are as non-techie as I am, you simply hire a trusted programmer to perform this task.

3) Change the default setting when installing scripts on your servers. Many scripts have default passwords, and default locations for critical directories that make these scripts work flawlessly. Since everyone obtaining a copy of these script have these settings, you probably want to change them, and you also may want to rename certain directories.

4) Secure your web logs. Many web hosts have a standard location for the website’s logs and statistics on each hosting account. The files that allow you to access, read, download, and manipulate this data often aren’t secured. At a minimum, password protect that directory.

The danger in someone readily accessing your logs is that they can see the names and paths of the files on your server, including your download pages and the file names of files that may actually be for sale products

There are not only people who search on your product name, looking for unsecured files – there are also people who enjoy posting those links on sites where this type of information is shared.

5) Put an index page in every directory on your server. If someone surfs to the domain name of one of the directories on your server, and there is no index page in that directory, they will get a directory tree… showing them all of the files in that directory, and allowing them to simply click in a given file name to access it.

Servers can be configured to prevent this, but for many people, the quickest and simplest way to protect their directories from prying eyes is to stick an index page in each directory.

6) Give your download pages hard to guess names. Don’t use urls like YourDomain.com/ProductName/download.html Instead you want to give download pages names comprised of a random sequence of letters and numbers, perhaps stick them in directories not even associated with a given product, or use a “download guard-type” script that gives each customer a unique download link and protects your files.

There are a lots of other things that you can do to easily close common holes in your website’s security. This article barely scrapes the surface, and is intended more to make you aware of the problem, and to get your thinking about it. Make regularly reading articles and reports on the topic a part of your education in how to operate a successful online business.

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Willie Crawford has been operating an online business for 13 years and believes that too many online marketers simply pretend that problems with website security don’t exist. For a really eye-opening report on website security, get the recordings of an interview Willie did with a leading web security expert at: http://timic.org/CloseTheDoor

WordPress Security – An Ounce of Prevention is Better than a Pound of Cure

By Ben Kemp in Featured

WordPress STD’s (Security Transgression Defilements) are a common occurrence. WordPress-powered websites are far from being immune to hackers, although the latest release/s address many earlier security issues. WordPress, like other content management systems and forums such as phpBB, vBulletin, is a major target for hackers and spammers. Basic prophylactic measures, or condoms for WordPress STDs, need not be complicated or expensive.

Those involved in hacking WordPress usually want to use the sites as concealed (cloaked) link farms. Its rare that actual damage is done to your site, and often the site owner remains blissfully unaware that there’s been any interference. Some of the link injection systems are extremely sophisticated! Testing for enemy action can be as simple as opening your site and choosing View / Source and reading through the content of the <Head> section down to, and including, the <BODY> tag. The link injections I’ve seen are usually immediately after <BODY>. Is there a long string of HTML code containing links to dozens of sites you know nothing about? If there is, you’ve been violated, and have a WordPress STD (Security Terminated Deficiency)!

SEO company STOLE my traffic!

By admin in Featured

Believe it or not, the article is true. This is what happened to a friend of mine. I am not at liberty to name the SEO company, especially since the investigation is still ongoing, but this is what happened.

A couple months ago, my friend hired an expensive SEO company (charged $2500) to reoptimize his website to get maximum exposure for the search engines.

After he paid the fee, he soon learned that they contracted out the job overseas to a bunch of random people who asked for his website hosting username and ftp password and told him that it should be ready in a few days.

They made some changes to his website. He visually saw many of them but not all of them. They said wait 3 months before making any other changes and let our SEO work do the job.

He waited, and his traffic started dropping. He contacted them, and they told him that it was completely normal while his website was being reindexed by Google, and to be patient.

His orders began to suffer, his visits were decreasing, he barely lasted the 3 months. When he tried to contact them again, they had disappeared.

He hired someone else to go in and take a look at his website to figure out what had gone wrong.. This is what they had done..

In his product catalog, some of the product names had a special hidden javascript next to them. When someone would go to the main website and click everything, the website would perform normally…

HOWEVER, if they came through a google referer in the http request, the javascript would activate and send his visitor to a competitor / spammy website who was selling the same products.

The only way he could have seen this, is if he visited his website like a normal visitor would who showed up from Google. Instead, he manually typed in his website address and therefore the javascript wouldn’t activate.

So here is a guy, who pays $2500 to an SEO company to help increase his traffic, and instead, all they ended up doing was stealing his money, AND his traffic.

This is something that everyone needs to be careful about. Don’t EVER trust an SEO company unless you have investigated THEM first. Don’t just hand over your FTP username and password to someone, and say “go ahead, and do what needs to be done”

…in this case what needed to be done was to hijack his website, steal a nice sum of cash, and run off in the middle of the night. His payment was cashed overseas, and the free mail accounts they had were no longer operational.

A real nice scam. Plus you have to wonder how much they made off his free traffic they stole over that 3 month period. How much other website hosting traffic did they steal from other websites caught in their SEO scam?

We’re all so desperate to get to the top rankings of the search engines, sometimes, we lose our business sense, and just hand money over to the first person who promises what we want to hear.

Jie Fang – Please share this story with anyone you know. More useful articles like this are at http://sillyinternet.blogspot.com

© Copyright 2012 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

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