-
All things come to an end
I’ve woken up today to find that CastleCops is going offline (link from DISOG). From their website: Greetings Folks, You have arrived at the CastleCops website, which is currently offline. It has been our pleasure to investigate online crime and volunteer with our virtual family to assist with your computer needs and make the Internet…
-
New years resolution for webmasters
Graham Cluley gives some advice on the Sophos blog on how to secure your website. Unfortunately he can’t resist touting the companies horn, rather than suggesting a much more effective solution for this scenario: whitelisting. First of all, files on a webserver need to change very rarely. Executables almost never and it is useful to…
-
Interesting thoughts from the Sophos blog
Niall from SophosLabs UK asks: why does spam work? and gives an interesting answer: In his opinion, although we think that claims made by spam is very “out there” and wonder why people keep falling for it, in fact it is no worse that what we see in other media (like TV commercials). On some…
-
Modulo implies division!
When programming, if you write foo / bar, where foo and bar are variables, you usually instinctively thing “can bar be zero? do I need to add a check that bar is zero?”. However how many of you apply the same line of thinking to the modulo operator? I didn’t (until now – when it…
-
WordPressDirect reponds (in a spammy fashion :-))
I received the following comment on my post about WordPressDirect by “Marty Rozmanith”: Hello, I am the creator of WordPressDirect. I want to set the record straight, since your blog is contributing to the disinformation about our service. Forget the content publishing for a second…We save people time and frustration in setting up a a…
-
Installing Avira (AntiVir)
After a tutorial on installing Avast and one for AVG 8 I decided to write up a tutorial on installing Avira (the former AntiVir). Download the install kit from their website (warning! there is some upselling going on) Install the software Done! Unfortunately there aren’t any options to make the program more silent or transparent…
-
Actively working against security…
Not only isn’t security the first priority for people, some make a selling point of being able to defeat it! Does the following type of phrase sound familiar to you? Our product uses HTTP, so there will be no problem traversing those pesky firewalls. The solution is of course in the middle (making admins realize…
-
How to interpolate a string in Perl?
Perl (and some other languages which came after it :-)) have a feature called interpolation, whereby the names of the variables in strings are replaced by their actual values. This is both useful and dangerous (it can easily result in problems like command injection / SQL injection / HTML injection (aka XSS) – as with…
-
How to make sure that your webserver isn’t blocket by the ISP?
First of all, if it says in your contract that you can’t run servers, doing so may result in your connection being cut, so do this on your own risk! Second of all, I don’t advocate running websites on a home machine. Get a VPS! All this said, if you do run a webserver on…