JBCR Virtual Solutions Blog

Archive for May, 2007

Google has started an Onli­neSe­cu­rity Blog.

Any of you who read my blog, or arti­cles page at my site, know that I was hacked. The cul­prit was “Mal­ware”. Look­ing for infor­ma­tion about this ‘nasty’ in a search today I came across: Google Online Secu­rity Blog at http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/

“To pro­tect Google’s users from this threat, we started an anti-malware effort about a year ago. As a result, we can warn you in our search results if we know of a site to be harm­ful and even pre­vent exploits from load­ing with Google Desk­top Search.” Ok, yes it is absolutely a great idea to warn poten­tial vis­i­tors that the may be infected if they go to a website.

One thing that con­cerns me a “tad” is this:

Even after a site that was infected in the past, but is now clean has a cache of the old “bad” pages that can turn up in searches. How does a web owner clear that. If some­one turns up an old page cached which con­tains a mali­cious script, who is respon­si­ble? Could this hap­pen? We don’t have a clear answer on this yet. When we do, we’ll post it here… So as I say­ing the Goole secu­rity blog states: “If your site has been hacked­Take the site offline in order to keep from putting your site’s vis­i­tors and your cus­tomers at risk. Then remove all of the offend­ing code and fix all under­ly­ing secu­rity vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties before putting your site back online.”

Ok, (I say that too much don’t I) so… Okay I read on and they refer web mas­ters to a link that says

“There are three basic steps to main­tain­ing a clean site from Iden­ti­fy­ing bad­ware on your site Remov­ing bad­ware from your site Pre­vent­ing bad­ware in the future ”

Source: http://www.stopbadware.org/home/security The attack on us was a lit­tle dif­fer­ent than a malware/badwrare sce­nario. We didn’t have malware/badware put on our site. We were attacked at some­one elses web­site BY mal­ware that used our com­puter to upload objec­tional con­tent to our site.

Even though we didn’t have malware/badware on our site, we used many of the same sug­gested reme­dies as we would have for malware/badware.

It’s been over month since we dis­cov­ered our site had been com­pro­mised, and nearly a full month since we cleaned out the bad files. Our site is still impacted by this episode and suf­fer­ing the back­lash from Google searches show­ing results for these bad pages even though they were removed at the end of April…

Oh… As for Google’s Matt Cutts — he has not, as of the date of this entry, responded to the mes­sage I left on his blog. Stay tuned!

Jan

Have you noticed the changes with Google search? Well just in case you haven’t let me tell you what’s news with them recently.

Google’s search look has changed. It will now include news, video, images, maps and more. All part of what is called Uni­ver­sal Search. It appears searches will now include top tabs that dis­play infor­ma­tion from dif­fer­ent sources.

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice pres­i­dent of search prod­ucts, said at the company’s head­quar­ters in Moun­tain View, California.

“We can pro­vide a much more holis­tic answer,” Mayer said. The com­pany has devel­oped a new set of for­mu­las to deter­mine where infor­ma­tion appears on the page”

Do a search and have a look. Keep your eye out for more changes.

Jan

I have been spend­ing a great deal of time in Sec­ond Life and writ­ing arti­cles about my expe­ri­ences. With all I have learned and learn as I go along I decided to start a new site so you could fol­low along with me. So do come visit:

http://www.secondlifesnippets.com

Jan

On my daily read­ing today I went into WebProWorld and found a post about a host­ing com­pany and can it influ­ence your search engine rank. In that post some­one stated that this host­ing com­pany had decided to block search engine bots due to usage by par­tic­u­lar sites. I was shocked.

In my research on this claim I found it was ‘Dreamhost’. It seems that ‘Dreamhost’ has noti­fied some sites of the need to block search engine crawlers but not other site own­ers. Also in my research I found a forum with post­ings from a rep from ‘Dreamhost’:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
John sys­tem sta­bil­ity man­ager at DreamHost
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Here is some snippets:

“The only cases where we would block google­bot are when the fol­low­ing con­di­tions are met:

–the site in ques­tion is caus­ing the server it is on to be unstable

–the site in ques­tion is caus­ing erratic or abnor­mal behav­ior on the part of google’s crawler

We do not block google­bot on every busy cus­tomer site, only when it is demon­strated that it is caus­ing arti­fi­cial usage (a 10 page site does not require 5000 hits from google­bot to be indexed =) and when the alter­na­tive to block­ing google­bot is dis­abling the entire domain. It is disin­gen­u­ous to sug­gest that this refers to google sim­ply index­ing sites — I actu­ally have been in direct with google engi­neers to help sort out the spe­cific cases where by their their crawler was not per­form­ing as it should be.”

His final comment

“I have already removed the blocks and con­tacted the cus­tomer to apol­o­gize — I also have trained the tech respon­si­ble and con­veyed the proper sit­u­a­tions in which such steps would be nec­es­sary to our entire com­pany at large”.

Read more here:
http://www.seopedia.org/internet-marketing-and-seo/dreamhost-asking-clients-to-block-googlebot/

Scary stuff when you think about it.

Jan

You can find a great deal of infor­ma­tion, and dis­cus­sions, on Web 2.0.

~Yes ~

How­ever, I’ve noticed just about every­thing I read these days is using the phrase “2.0″ I have seen Copy­writ­ing 2.0, Voice 2.0, Mobile 2.0, eLearn­ing 2.0, and in fact the other night I was watch­ing “Fam­ily Jew­els” and Gene Sim­mons (of KISS fame) stated, after remov­ing his ban­dages from his face lift, “Gene Sim­mons — 2.0″.

It seems EVERYTHING is going 2.0!!

So what exactly is Web 2.0 and what does it mean to you? Read more here: http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html#20