Tag Archives: web
Protect your website with your ethical hacking knowledge
The first cause for websites being hacked is the lack of knowledge of their webmasters.
Hackers or even wannabe hackers can modify your website home page, steal your website profits and fame by just using ready to be downloaded exploits published into trusted and untrusted internet security portals.
Whether you have a basic knowledge of web site publishing or you are an experienced webmaster the only thing to protect yourself from hackers attacks is ethical hacking.
Ethical hacking means understanding your enemy mind, skills, intentions and strength, up to take the successful countermeasures that will save your daily hard job into developing a successful and trusted web platform.
Image damages causing shareholders and customers complaints, not to mention 6 figures money loss, is what led many big corporations to hire dozens of ethical hackers to keep their networks and web site safe from “bad” hackers.
In this article I am going to focus on the following two questions: What do ethical hackers do? What can I do to protect my website if I am not an ethical hacker?
The first step taken by hackers, should they be ethical or evil, is to scan your web application for known vulnerabilities. This can be achieved through a penetration testing process that can be manual or automated by some programs and scripts. This is the most important and crucial task in every attack attempt. And this is what an ethical hacker can’t fail.
The second step is to get a working exploit to take advantage of the vulnerability found in step 1. Here is where protection and fixes should take place to *prevent* the attack and not to just cure after the disaster. Ethical hackers in this case would be able to modify source codes to cover the holes or just reduce the success rate of the attack dramatically.
I would strongly advise to work on the first step since it is the most simple to master whether you’re not expert into security field or you just don’t have enough money to hire an experienced ethical hacker.
Internet security knowledge is what can save your site with a very cheap price. At the most basic level this can be achieved by keeping yourself informed on your websites scripts well-known vulnerabilities, available patches and security best practices.
Moreover the understanding of basic attacking vectors like Cross site scripting or SQL Injection will keep you safe from a big number of wannabe hackers that you will be able to defeat…with your knowledge! So next time you will see some suspicious activity in your website log you will be laughing at it, since not a dummy tool but your own knowledge as ethical hacker will be protecting you.
Submit RSS Feeds Dump Tedious Feed Submission!
Submitting RSS feeds to RSS directories can be a real pain for webmasters or business owners who use RSS feeds to make regular product announcements or promotional offers. When RSS technology first appeared on the internet in the late 90s, the usage is pretty limited. As time passes, RSS feeds have gained much momentum as content syndication becomes a widely accepted means to update web content. Lets explore the use of RSS feeds and why you should be using RSS submission software to submit RSS feeds.
RSS is the abbreviation or acronym of Really Simple Syndication. RSS feeds are in XML file format which are not readable in its raw form. In order for you to view the content of the RSS feeds, you would need a reader or aggregator to do so. There are many online readers such as My Yahoo, Bloglines, NewsGator etc.
RSS feeds are primarily created to offer dynamic content, ie content that is fresh and updated. As you can see, many news press are using RSS feeds to provide their readers with the latest news in the stock market, sports and world news. Commercial companies offer feeds to subscribers as a means to announce new products, company news, or as an advertising channel. Webmasters use RSS feeds on their websites so that visitors can always read about the latest developments in the web topic or niche such as medical, internet marketing or even stock movements.
Webmasters can build RSS feeds from their web pages and submit RSS feeds to specific niche RSS directories for distribution. This is an excellent way to reach targeted audiences and gain significant traffic. Search engines are not the only places to grab free traffic. When webmasters list their RSS feeds in the RSS feed directories, visitors to these directories may like what they are reading and visit the parent websites. On another note, interesting feeds may be syndicated by fellow webmasters in the same niche. This is invaluable since you would be getting traffic from their websites as well as get some one-way links. We all know that this would have a positive impact on your search engine ranking.
If you are not using RSS feeds to promote your website, you are really losing out to your competitors. That said, it can be a lengthy process to submit RSS feeds for inclusion in the news or RSS feeds directories. Increasingly more webmasters are turning to RSS submission software as a solution to submit RSS feeds.
Lets use a simple example to illustrate the benefits. Imagine that your income is 30 dollars per hour, and you need to spend about 3-5 hours to manually submit RSS feeds to about 50 60 feed directories. The time you lost is worth more than 100 dollars to you each time you submit a RSS feed. Multiply that by the number of websites you have and it is easy to understand why it is more economical to use RSS submission software to submit RSS feeds. Visit my blog to read more about RSS feed submission and popular and affordable RSS submission software webmasters have in their toolkit.