Gawkwire: Web Hosting and Internet News Resource

How to Protect Your Sites from the Gumblar Botnet

2009-05-28T10:16:00-04:00

(WebHost Blog) First thing to do if you suspect your site has been compromised is to check it. There are numerous ways of doing this, you could use Google Chrome and go through your site, you could do a search for pieces of Gumblar code, or you can use a utility such as Malwarebytes.

Code injected into a site can be small (a few lines of code) or can be a varietiable War and Peace. The code to search for is (function( and .replace(. The code is normally found before <body> tags in HTML code or at the end of a .JS file. The code, so far, only compromises HTML, JS, and PHP files.

Now that you found it, the next step is up to you. You can opt to remove all the code or you can lockdown your FTP first. This really depends on what your site does. If it has a lot of traffic then I would suggest removal first then lockdown. Getting that code off of your site so it doesn’t affect your audience is a top priority.

To do this you could use third party software or you can do it by hand. Personally, I always go for by hand since I know that I will find all iterations of the problem. Using the search method, you can comb through your files quickly, deleting all of the Gumblar code. Also you should delete any folder that has only image.php files in them.

Locking the site down starts with changing the FTP password. Make sure the new one is long, and filled with characters, numbers, letters, etc. Once that is done look through folder and file permissions, if you site requires that some files/folders need write permissions that is fine but make sure only those things have them.

Gumblar’s rate of infection has grown by 188% over the last week, but with a little effort, your site can keep from becoming a statistic.

About David Dunlap: Over the past ten years David has been a prolific author of hundreds of blogs, commentaries and reviews found here on WebHostBlog.com , as well as WebHostMagazine.com and other sites around the Internet. David manages the daily operations at both WebHostBlog and Web Host Magazine & Buyer's Guide, and as the head editor, David uses his unique analytical skills to ensure that both sites maintain their integrity and tough, but fair minded, reputations. Prior to his active career analyzing the Web Host industry, David specialized in networking and communications for the U.S. government. David's expertise in traditional marketing and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has helped boost companies both inside and outside of the Web Host industry.

http://www.gawkwire.com/technology/how_to_protect_your_sites_from_the_gumblar_botnet.html

WolframAlpha, Google Killer it is Not, but Still Cool

2009-05-19T00:38:00-04:00

(WebHost Blog) First, interface. I like the output pages a lot. I like how it gives you an interpretation of what you wrote since it allows you to see what you screwed up if the search fails… and fail you will.

The hardest part I hear some people have is getting use to the search query. Well honestly, this is not the type of search engine you will use to grab web sites. It is however, a search engine to grab facts. Such as if you type July 1 Canada, Wolfram Alpha will send you back things such as the format for the date, time difference between today and July 1st, sunrise/sunset times for Ottawa, Canadian holidays for the 1st, etc.

But if I type in something such as “how to make chicken soup,” I get an error. If I type that same line in Google, the first return I get is WikiHow, How to Make Chicken Soup: 10 steps. However, if I type in “canned chunky chicken soup” into WolframAlpha I get the average nutrition content of all canned chunky chicken soups, WolframAlpha has in its database.

Wolfram is meant to be a search engine for all factual data in the world. I read recently that it doesn’t handle sports. So I put it to the test. How will I test for factual data for sports? Easy I will ask for baseball stats, if there is any game more meticulous or analytical on its stat keeping than baseball I haven’t heard of it. I typed in Babe Ruth average ERA (since he was a pitcher at the beginning of his career) and I got nothing. I typed in Babe Ruth homeruns still nothing. I typed in just Babe Ruth and I got back his full name, date and place of birth, and date and place of death.

But type in Internet users and it will spit back the estimated total amount of Internet users in the world, the country with the most and the country with the least among other things.

Wolfram won’t be able to tell you who hit more than 30 homeruns in 1947, but it can solve a variety of mathematic equations. Likewise it won’t be able to tell you how to cook chicken soup, but it will tell you the average nutritional information of it. Wolfram is pretty cool for fooling around, but in its current state it remains nothing more than an idle curiosity.

To have a stab at it yourself go here http://www.wolframalpha.com.

http://www.gawkwire.com/technology/wolframalpha_google_killer_it_is_not_but_still_cool.html

9 Ways to Make Your Vlog More Professional

2009-05-18T09:21:00-04:00

(WebHost Blog) However, from what I have noticed video and sound quality is quite horrific and often times many vblogs instead of coming off as laid back and easy going end up taking a one way trip to Amateurville (which is right next to IHaveNoIdeaWhatIAmDoing City located in the State of Denial).

1. Stay focused and advance the topic. You only have so much time to make you point and be memorable. Don’t waste it.

2. Make it interesting. The last thing anyone wants to see is a video that is boring and the last thing you want to see is comments saying this wasted the viewer’s time. Keep it interesting. If you don’t know if its interesting enough have outsiders view before you publish.

3. Prepare Talking Points or a Script. In order to keep things focused an interesting preparing talking points and questions for interviews ahead of time is essential. If the vlog is a tutorial of some sort, do several walk-throughs of what you want to do before the camera rolls. If you are doing something such as a mini movie then have a script.

4. Quality Ingredients produce a Quality product. Camcorder, external microphone, lighting, get them.

5. Keep it Short, 5 mins or less. Keep it short and simple and to the point. 5 mins or less. If it is going to be longer break it up into segments.

6. Brand your vlogs. If you want professional then you should brand every one of your vlogs. Use a logo or maybe a small text block.

7. Use editing software. Editing software is essential to make sure the colors, contrast, brightness, and resolutions are solid. Also you should be editing you work, cutting out bad points, or errors, and splicing in corrections you might have filmed later.

8. Lighting lighting lighting. Lighting makes or break video. More lighting is better, you want to reduce the amount of shadows in your production. There are a lot of resources online and off on the use of production quality lighting. If you are serious about vlogging you should study them.

9. Don’t be afraid to cut stuff out. When it comes to video no one keeps all of the film to final production. For a five minute video you are looking at ten minutes of film, at the least.

Follow these rules and you too shall enjoy professional vlogs. Until next time, happy hosting!

A few good resources:

Life Hacker: 8 Ways to Shoot Video Like a Pro

BlogBloke: How to Make Professional Podcast Videos for Your Blog

MetaCafe: Production School

http://www.gawkwire.com/video_tv/9_ways_to_make_your_vlog_more_professional.html

UC Berkeley Database Hacked, 160,000 Records Compromised

2009-05-11T06:35:00-04:00

(WebHost Magazine) Security experts say the hack could have been prevented by protecting the sensitive medical information stored on easily accessible spreadsheets.

News of the data breach came to light Friday after it was discovered that hackers had broken into a medical database UC Berkeley shared with Mills College that contained health-related information for students, alumni and their families. ... Go to source

http://www.gawkwire.com/technology/uc_berkeley_database_hacked_160_000_records_compromised.html

How to Write Good Content?

2009-05-08T09:35:00-04:00

(WebHost Blog) It is fairly vague is it not; “content sells,” “focus on making quality content,” “content is king,” etc. these are all well and good concepts, but how do you go about writing quality content or finding the subject matter for quality content? Even myself, with some 14 years of journalistic experience in total, will have problems finding good topics.

What to Write About
When it comes to writing quality content the first step is choosing what to write about. There are a few methods to choose what to write on. The two methods I use the most is I write on things that I want to know more information about. An example of this was the blog I wrote on data center tiers. Actually I wrote this more for myself since I was sick and tired of reading about a web host’s tier 3 data center, blah, blah, blah. In the end, the article garnered a lot of hits because there are probably a lot of people out there who feel the same way I do. This blog is also about putting down some information that is hard to find. Most places tell you, you need content, but they don’t tell you how to go about getting it.

The second route is to write something that interests you. Some articles I’ve written have been born from conversations I’ve had at a bar. Their topics interested me and so I wrote about them. I have a blog coming up about reinventing the wheel for fun and profit. To get this topic I thought about conventional wisdom and what happens when we turn it on its ear. I focused on “don’t reinvent the wheel” because I have seen that we all do it. I saw a few examples that have reinvented the wheel and from there I moved on the next step.

How to Write it
Stay on topic. Staying on topic is very important and unfortunately for myself and everyone involved, I rarely do. But if I did, my blogs would be shorter and easier to read and probably a bit more popular. But I digress. You want to be on topic and you want to research your topic. Nothing worse than having something to write about, but not having anything to say. Don’t start writing your article/blog/pamphlet/whatever on the day its due. Instead do some research, write some notes, and write a few paragraphs a week or so in advance. This gives you some time to read it over, remove sentences that don’t work or are uninteresting or are even off topic.

Testing Quality
If you have an idea for content that you think will bring it a lot of good traffic and will live up to all of those odd monikers for content success discussed earlier then you should probably have people you know read it before it gets published. Let the readers know you want objectivity and to not pull any punches and you also have to be able to take a great deal of abuse on something you have worked long and hard on. Absolute candor and objectivity is a must when determining article quality. Revision and building on the ideas your editors discussed will get you further to honing your words.

Putting it All Together
So I first thought about conventional wisdom. I thought about various quotes like work smarter not harder, a penny saved is a penny earned, the early bird gets the worm, etc. Although the last one of those is a good topic I might write on (who needs to get up early when you can have Google get your worm for you), but I ended up zeroing in on don’t reinvent the wheel. I brainstormed what the phrase means and the different ways innovation has come out of not following this age old axiom. Then I picked one of those ways to talk about. After that I wrote about it and how the wheel was in fact reinvented over and over again, with each successful build even better than the previous one. So I wrote it up and shelved it. I went back to it last week and read it over to see if it flows off the tongue. This week I am picking out some pictures for it. I gave it to a few friends of mine, both in work and outside and I await what they think about it. After that takes place I will go through and revise it then I will send it back to my friends to look over again.

Pick your topic, research it, pick an aspect of it, get it edited. That is how you make quality content.

http://www.gawkwire.com/business/how_to_write_good_content.html

FaceBook Quizzes

2009-05-06T09:49:00-04:00

(WebHost Blog) To see how fast things could move, I ran an experiment. Using my personal FaceBook account (the one for family and friends) I picked three topics for quizzes to look for to see how many far they would propagate. I have several friends who are microbiologists or are going to school for microbiology, so for the first quiz I choose “What virus would you be?” Without sending this quiz to others, it had been filled out by 67 people, possibly more, still waiting on my friend network to report how many of their friends’ friends have used it. 67 people in twenty minutes. The quiz itself is not a recent one, it has been around for several months.

The next quiz was something more generic, but also one of those things that is good for nerdy laughs. What Periodic Element are you? Coincidentally I was Gold ( lol ). This one didn’t spread as far as the other one, but not bad considering I know pretty much no one who has any sort of chemist inclinations. 44 people in an hour. Again this quiz was written a few months ago.

The very last one is something near and dear to me heart: “Which Liquor are you?” This one spread like wildfire. Several hundred people picked this one up and ran with it. After the first half day worth (about 10 hours), I stopped keeping track.

Two things I found wrong with these quizzes, one thing I found right. First off, people love quizzes. I like stupid trivia, they enjoy answering funny questions with equally funny answers, and they enjoy getting funny little results. Good quizzes will gather good traffic and great quizzes, well you can see my meaning.

The two problems with quizzes is a) most of them have no thought put into them and b) people don’t capitalize on them as much as they should.

A good quiz can take several days to put together, mainly because you want to give the audience as many different results as possible and you want the questions and answers to be as funny (or thought provoking depending on what you are doing) as possible. If you are trying to monetize the quiz the amount of thought that is put into becomes even greater. Now you have to pick the approach as to how you will make money off of it, how to integrate that, and how to make the quiz coincide with what you want to sell.

Some industries are far easier than others when it comes to putting out great quizzes and being able to profit off of them. In this instance profit can be multiple things. It can be making money or it can be producing traffic or increasing your page rank, whatever. For instance the game industry is perfect for quizzes. Role playing especially, you could make a quiz such as what class or alignment or race are you and then at the end tell them to “join the fight” or whatever.

Web hosting quizzes can be done, though most would probably be more serious with a splash of humor, such as how secure is your site?

Hopefully I have given you a few more ideas to punch around. I hope the general moral of this blog has not gone unnoticed. On a broad scale, you can use any tool, any area of human interaction to garner opportunities. On a smaller and semi more selfish scale (at least this is to help me out), put some attention into these stupid quizzes, I want to be entertained not bored to death. 8-D

http://www.gawkwire.com/business/facebook_quizzes.html

Why is Age a Good Indicator in Web Hosting?

2009-05-01T13:55:00-04:00

(WebHost Blog) Well it’s not necessarily the test, there are a few hosts who have been around for a while and are still horrible, but for the most part the age of a host shows that it is stable, profitable, and, by extension, probably fairly good at keeping customers (hence price is either really cheap, features are really high, and/or customer support is very good).

A host who has been around for 10 years plus such as dedicated server host Superb or OLM will probably be around for a while. If we look at the life cycle of a host, the first few years are the growing stage. If the host doesn’t grow it gets bought out or it dissolves. During this time the host might grow through growing pains such as moving to a new data center or getting a large influx of customers and must expand their technical and customer support teams, etc.

After the grow stage comes the, monotony stage. From 4-9 years the founders of the company start to look to get bought out if they become tired or bored with the industry. Hosting is a very demanding industry and some people would rather cash in then spend another moment in it. It is also during this time when the founders might find out that really enjoy hosting and looking into the long haul.

About ten years plus, the host is probably in it for the duration. These companies are normally considered fairly stable and profitable (or else they would have gone out of business already). If they are profitable then it means the host can keep customers. Many hosting plans start as a loss as far as money goes and only become profitable the longer the customer stays and/or they move up the product chain (adding extra features, higher tier service plans, etc.). If a customer is around long enough to turn a profit for the company, than the company is probably doing something right the majority of the time and hence the extension (fairly good at keeping customers, as stated previously).

Again there are always exceptions to the rule. But for the most part, age is a good indicator in determining web host success.

Author: Over the past ten years David has been a prolific author of hundreds of blogs, commentaries and reviews found here on WebHostBlog.com , as well as WebHostMagazine.com and other sites around the Internet. David manages the daily operations at both WebHostBlog and Web Host Magazine & Buyer's Guide, and as the head editor, David uses his unique analytical skills to ensure that both sites maintain their integrity and tough, but fair minded, reputations. Prior to his active career analyzing the Web Host industry, David specialized in networking and communications for the U.S. government. David's expertise in traditional marketing and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has helped boost companies both inside and outside of the Web Host industry.

http://www.gawkwire.com/web_hosting/why_is_age_a_good_indicator_in_web_hosting.html