An interesting thing happened to one of my customers this week.  She received an email complaining that her website had been hacked and had crashed a visitor’s computer.  It turns out that the site wasn’t hacked, but it was an exciting half an hour. What if you don’t have a website developer?  How can you [...]

It’s every website owner’s nightmare.  You discover your site is hacked.  Now what do you do? It’s probably not as bad as you think Over the years I’ve helped several of my clients after their websites were hacked.  Most of the sites were easy to fix.   In fact, about half the attacked sites I’ve worked [...]

It happens to most website owners eventually.  They receive an email from a visitor that says something like, “While visiting your site I got a message from my antivirus software that it detected a virus and removed a trojan. Your website is unsafe!” What do you do? The first step is to try and determine [...]

The folks over at WordPress are talking about a worm that’s infecting older versions of WordPress.  If you haven’t upgraded your software, now’s the time! Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a [...]

I use several different hosting companies.  One that I haven’t written about before is ICDSoft.  I don’t recommend them to customers because they don’t offer telephone support.  However if you’re an experienced developer, this is a great host. Uncharacteristically, ICDSoft was down last week.  I discovered that they were experiencing a DDoS or distributed denial-of-service [...]

What do website owners have in common with presidential candidates?  They’ve got to worry about hackers and website security.  Last summer the websites of both candidates came under attack. What can you do to keep your website safe? If you use any third party software on your website be sure to keep it updated.  These [...]

I’ll be spending a lot of time on the road this summer.  What’s a website developer to do to make sure that she’s safe from evil spammers and hackers when she’s using wifi hotspots? She tries to find a good personal VPN service. I’m using a product from Witopia.net.  The price is reasonable and it [...]

Over the last week I’ve received this email from several different people: I checked with Norton Anti-Virus, and they are gearing up for this virus! I checked snopes.com, this afternoon ( 04-05-08) and it is for real!! Get this E-mail message sent around to your contacts ASAP. PLEASE FORWARD THIS WARNING AMONG FRIENDS, FAMILY AND [...]

Recently hackers infected my in-laws’ computer. “You’ve got a virus,” warning messages flashed at them. An antivirus program that they never had heard of urged them to download their newest product to take care of the problem. The antivirus program was malware, software designed to be utilized without the computer owner’s informed consent. Was this [...]

E-mail injection. Even the name sounds vile doesn’t it? In an e-mail injection attack spammers use forms on YOUR website to send out their spam. The basic idea is that a spammer, let’s call him Lousy Larry, finds a form on your website. It could be anything from a contact form to an order form. [...]