Gawkwire: Web Hosting and Internet News Resource

SecureData 365 Announces General Manager Michael Thomas

2009-08-27T09:21:00-04:00

CANTON, OH (Gawkwire.com) Michael Thomas has been named general manager of SecureData 365, an advanced data center located in Canton, Ohio.

Thomas has more than 30 years of experience in the field in multiple disciplines of IT (information technology). He was previously director of IT security for Progressive Insurance.At Progressive, he led the implementation of technical security and the risk strategy functions.
Thomas also led efforts to build secured e-commerce implementations for online sales, and he pioneered the use of digital signatures on the Internet.

While the SecureData 365 facility in Canton is new, its employees - including Thomas - have more than 90 years of combined experience in the field.

"As SecureData 365 continues to grow, our entire team is dedicated to helping our customers and protecting their most valuable information assets with advanced security and network infrastructure," Thomas said.

"We will continually strive to engage our customers in a productive partnership, and we'll make smart facilities investments that expand and scale our facilities to meet our customers' needs."

http://www.gawkwire.com/business/securedata_365_announces_general_manager_michael_thomas.html

Next Generation of Email Security

2009-08-24T09:24:00-04:00

(WebHost Blog) The bulk of vendors using the next generation moniker when it comes to email are anti-spam companies and let’s face it, there is a very good reason for that. The first generation of anti-spam software did not solve the problem. Nor did they slow the problem. In fact, the bulk of anti-spam countermeasures have done next to nothing.

At Hostingcon 2009, I was at a session where representatives from Rackspace and Cloudmark were discussing anti-spam software and someone posted on the Twitter board that they thought the next generation of email security would be passwords and encryption.

I have to beg to differ with this reasoning. Password and encrypted email technologies have been around for a very long time. The only thing that is needed in that department is adoption not necessarily more tools. There are tools already that add an encryption layer to programs such as Microsoft Exchange. The only failure for those tools is that very few people actually use them.

Spam on the other hand has three major problems that have not been addressed. First off, high levels of spam flood networks and use up server and network resources. Second, spam can be a vector for malware. Third, current anti-spam products have a problem with false positives and by putting legitimate business email into a spam folder or even trash, spam makes employees waste countless time sifting through these junk folders to find emails that are necessary to their work.

According to a report by Symantec back in May of this year, spam accounts for 90% of all email. With that large of an amount, spam doesn’t just hassle users, it costs data centers hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in power, maintenance, and hardware costs each year, globally.

When we look at the security threats that email is faced with everyday, spam IS the highest priority and therefore the future of email security will be anti-spam software until the problem is resolved, if ever. Now a solution like Cloudmark’s Cloudfilter is very much an innovative means of solving the spam problem, but also all of its side issues. By removing spam before it gets to a network mail server, CloudFilter saves the data center a great deal of money and protects users by keeping malware out of their inboxes.

So when Cloudmark says they are offering the next generation of email security… well I am inclined to agree.

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 and search engine marketing has helped boost companies both inside and outside of the Web Host industry.

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

Breaches Cast Critical-Eye on Best Practices

2009-08-20T09:42:00-04:00

(WebHost Blog) 130 million cards, damages in the billions, if not the hundreds of billions of dollars were caused by SQL injections, sniffers, and backdoor malware. These were not overly complicated code written by world class hackers these were moderately difficult techniques that are employed on a constant basis.

Indeed the Web Hacking Incident Database labels the SQL injection as the most commonly exploited flaw on a Web application.Sniffers were deployed to capture credit card data and were used in concert with breaches to the database to collect necessary information. Backdoor malware used to transmit the data back to their servers. Once the initial breach was made, the hackers “installed” the sniffers and the malware to complete the process of collecting card information and sending it back.

What’s even more amazing about this, is the fact that the FBI and Secret Service sent out a warning that talked about the various ways hackers will exploit known problems to capture card data. Security experts who looked at these three cases determined that the warning was almost an exact blueprint of each breach.

You may not have access to several million credit cards. Your web site might not be a financial institution. Your web site might only have a modest amount of customers and be a relatively minor player in your industry. Regardless of what your site is, you owe it to your customers, readership, and yourself to provide a secure environment. The tools for prevention of SQL injections. XSS, malware distribution and the like are available. Get educated and get secure.

http://www.gawkwire.com/technology/breaches_cast_critical-eye_on_best_practices.html

Tweet Density less than Stellar

2009-08-18T12:38:00-04:00

(WebHost Blog)The study found that the bulk of all tweets were quite pointless; 40% in fact. 37% of all tweets were chunks of conversations between a handful of people (a dialogue that does not encompass the entire network). Spam, oddly enough, only accounted for 4%. Making 81% of your average tweets mostly worthless to the average user.

Re-tweets accounted for 9%, self promotion accounted for 6%, and news brought up the rear with only 4%.
Pear Analytics was of course besides themselves when it came to the data. They figured news, spam, and self-promotion would both be higher and that conversational tweets would be a lot less.

For myself, I am only surprised at the spam category. However it makes sense. Two things that Twitter as going for it in when it comes to spam is the fact that you can easily unsubscribe from anyone who is spamming you. People over look the occasional spam or self-promotion from those who give quality tweets so the density of both will be low. However, if we look at email, spam started out very small and now it takes up more than 90% of all email sent globally. For spam to work on Twitter, it will probably have to stem from hijacked accounts, but I digress.

As far as being a news medium, well that greatly depends on who you follow. The average person may get involved with one or two seriously big events once or twice in a lifetime. However, if you are following journalists, news outlets, and the like, well Twitter then becomes your RSS feed. To increase the amount of useful resources you receive through Twitter follow bloggers. Its not too hard to tailor your channel to receive quality tweets, nor should it be a chore for you to tweet meaningful tweets to others. Simply ask yourself before you press enter, would I read this?

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 and search engine marketing has helped boost companies both inside and outside of the Web Host industry.

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

Yahoo and Microsoftâ€¦ Again

2009-08-03T10:02:00-04:00

(WebHost Blog) However, I think some of them are looking only at the service of the deal and not at the some of the additional benefits to Microsoft or Yahoo (especially Yahoo since their stocks plummeted).

Wall street was very disappointed with the deal since Yahoo doesn’t get any cash up front, but I think it should be known that Yahoo didn’t loose anything therefore didn’t really sell anything therefore not getting a paycheck at the beginning is inconsequential. What they received was a partnership with Microsoft. Microsoft will outsource their search engine and advertising technology to Yahoo. Microsoft gains additional traffic, Yahoo can free up resources for use elsewhere.

A bigger audience doesn’t just mean that Microsoft and Yahoo will gain money through advertising, what it also means is that Microsoft can garner valuable research and can even use Yahoo (or perhaps Bing since Bing will have the smaller audience) as a test bed for developing new search features. Realistically, Microsoft and Yahoo know that this deal won’t unseat Google as the number 1 search engine juggernaut, but what it does do is give both companies the ability to become more competitive down the road.

Yahoo, for instance, can take the money they were using before for search engine R&D and move it into developing tools, APIs, platforms for their user base, etc. Or, they could use that money to research a better search engine without being under the gun to release new updates to the public. 10 years down the road when the partnership ends Yahoo would then have a search engine platform with 10 years of R&D in it. They could also simply pocket the money, save on the expense to increase their profits.

This is not some scheme to try to get number 1 in search engines quick. This is a long term strategy for mutual improvement of two companies in hopes of the eventually unseating of Google as the king of search engines.

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