Posts by happygeek

Thread closed, please see the other referenced post and answer there. OP, please do not ask the same question in multiple forums...

An interesting post appeared yesterday in the official Google Online Security and Webmaster Central blogs which confirms that in an effort to "make the Internet safer" it has been testing a system which looks at "whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms." This follows calls for HTTPS everywhere at the recent Google I/O a few months back.

Google says is has seen positive results, and is now actually using HTTPS as a ranking signal albeit a "very lightweight" one which only impacts <1% of queries. Nonetheless, the intention is now clear that this will be the way forward and the signal will most likely be given more weight once website owners have had fair chance to make the move from HTTP to HTTPS.

Keep an eye open for official announcements from Google in the coming weeks, including best practice advise such as using 2048-bit key certificates and relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain (using protocol relative URLs for all other domains.)

Mark Sparshott, a director at security vendor Proofpoint, says "I welcome Google's move to use HTTPS as ranking signal and downgrade those sites that are not encrypting connections to their visitors but caution that the minimal scope and weighting Google are applying may not be enough of a deterrent for poor security best practice yet."

Hi K, from a little further oop north in West Yorkshire. We are a truly global outfit here at DaniWeb, from the community members through to the admins and moderators - scattered all over the place :)

A report from Hold Security claims that one of the biggest ever online heists has been committed by a Russian crime gang. It would appear that the data theft includes, wait for it, no less than 1.2 billion (yes billion) username and passwords along with around half a billion email addresses obtained from more than 400,000 websites. In total, Hold Security says, the stolen data amounts to some 4.5 billion items.

According to the report the gang acquired databases of stolen credentials from online dark markets which were then used to attack e-mail providers, social media, and other websites. Spam was then distributed which contained malware as a result. "Earlier this year, the hackers altered their approach" Hold Security says, with the gang gaining access to data from botnets which identified SQL vulnerabilities on the sites they visited. "The botnet conducted possibly the largest security audit ever" according to the company with "over 400,000 sites identified to be potentially vulnerable to SQL injection flaws alone." It was these vulnerabilities that were used to steal the data.

Mark James, a security specialist at ESET, says that because the data appears to have been harvested from a number of different location, ranging from the dark market through to the smallest of websites with lapse security, it suggests a lot of effort went into the heist. "Organising all this data into a central repository and then using it to gain access to more systems would point to a very organised gang …

So, let's get this straight: you run an online reputation company (as per your signature) and yet you are asking us how to create an online reputation?

Kind of suggests that either your original post was actually just some kind of thinly disguised spam or you are pretty rubbish at yur job, and quite possibly both.

Starring Jim Carrey as...?

Warrens80, do you have any interest in IT at all? Becuase, if not, then I seriously wonder why you are here if I'm being honest...

Free
Respected
Educational
DaniWeb

DaniWeb rules clearly state: provide evidence of having done some work yourself if posting questions from school or work assignments

Just copying your assignment questions here is not good enough, and nobody is going to help you unless you show us what you've done and what problems you are having.

How recently have you hired this 'expert team' and what promises did they make? You are not going to see immediate results, it takes time to build your traffic organically.

What?

Sorry, let me explain that better.

WHAT?

OK.

It's probably as long as a piece of string.

Or, if you prefer, it depends on too many factors to give any meaningful answer. How many times is that data written/deleted? The number of write cycles will impact upon longevity. The better the flash memory used, as in the more write cycles it is rated for, then the longer the data should last.

Ditto :)

How long is a piece of string? The honest answer is nobody knows...

Every week, Stephen Coty writes about interesting exploits that have caught his attention as chief security evangelist at Alert Logic. This last week (in a currently password protected posting) he mused about a 'JournalCtl and Syslog Terminal Escape Injection' zero day which could be of interest to the Linux gurus here on DaniWeb.

Here's the story. A new init control system called Systemd is being integrated into Linux distros, in an effort to update and overhaul SysV and upstart so as to become a more modern init system. Fedora has already jumped into Systemd, and as I understand it Ubuntu won't be far behind.

What has caught the attention of the security researchers at Alert Logic, however, is that the Systemd architecture uses a log management architecture called journal which uses journalctl to read the binary data represented in the journals. Which is where things get interesting, Coty says, as journal has the ability to read ‘unprintable’ characters.

Without the use of the right flags, messages with unprintable characters are referenced as binary blobs and Journalctl fully allows terminal escape characters to be represented (while the older syslog system filters these out) and so opens up an injection risk.

Coty tells me that if we were to inject something like echo -e “\e]2;WINDOW HIJACK\a” then it would be possible to hijack the title bar of the tab or terminal window.

"All we need to do is be able to find daemons, locally …

Your Member of the Month interview will be in the newsletter this month :)

Jaime Blasco, director of AlienVault Labs, has added his thoughts:

“TOR provides anonymity, if you want to have privacy you still have to use something like a VPN in order to connect to the TOR network. You are still facing other problems like tracking and profiling or unauthorized access to your system using exploitation of the browser or any other software you are using over the TOR network. As an example the FBI used an exploit affecting Firefox to deanonymize TOR users accessing illegal content. On the other hand, governments are actively investing a huge amount of money and resources in order to compromise the TOR network. If you want to be secure you should assume TOR is compromised and use other methods to maintain your anonymity and privacy within TOR.”

Yesterday, Tor issued a security advisory which revealed that a group of relays had been discovered on July 4th which looked like they "were trying to deanonymize users."

The advisory states that the attack "involved modifying Tor protocol headers to do traffic confirmation attacks" with the relays having joined the network at the start of the year. This means they were potentially deanonymizing users between January 30th and July 4th when they were finally removed.

A Tor spokesperson says that they know the attack "looked for users who fetched hidden service descriptors, but the attackers likely were not able to see any application-level traffic" so no details of pages visited or whether hidden services searched for were actually visited at all for that matter. The advisory goes on to warn that it is likely that the attackers tried to learn "who published hidden service descriptors, which would allow the attackers to learn the location of that hidden service."

No evidence was found to suggest that any exit relays were being operated, so the probability of linking users to destinations on standard Tor circuits remains remote. For full technical details of the attack methodology, see the advisory which goes into this at some length.

The following steps have been taken to remediate the damage in the short term:

• Attacking relays removed from the Tor network
• A software update has gone out for relays in order to prevent such use of 'relay early' cells again
• A new Tor version warns …

Hi Anna, welcome to DaniWeb.

Then contact Gmail support and they will help you if you are, indeed, the genuine owner of the account.

Please read the rules here, in particular: Do not ask for help to pursue any illegal activity including, but not limited to, hacking and spamming

This thread now closed to prevent any outbreak of the above...

No need, as you are allowed to ask the same question across different sites (why wouldn't you be?) but you are not allowed to copy someone else's question/answer/editorial. Oh, and Gribouillis is a moderator - see the blue label under his name :)

Hello Mahmoud, welcome to DaniWeb.

Welcome, looks like you've come to the right place :)

Moved to correct forum, so you may want to unsolve it now... :)

Also, nobody knows what "what is the end of online marketing or internet marketing technique which never end" means, and I imagine that includes the OP.

AVG (as a company) has a very blotted copybook courtesy of the damned secure search toolbar that it loves to install all over the place, and which borders on being malware (foistware is a good word for the thing) itself IMHO.

Malwarebytes (free version from this page) is another useful tool in the anti-malware armory. Often picks up stuff other scanners have missed.

Weclome, and soak away like a sponge - eventually you will be able to wring some back out into the community :)

It seems like forever, but actually it was only the end of last year that we were writing about CryptoLocker which had pretty much redefined the ransomware landscape. Now this particular threat market is morphing again with the discovery of onion crypto ransomware.

Also known as Critroni, and CTB-Locker for what it's worth, the ransomware has been openly available (if you'll excuse the contradiction) on the underweb dark market for a few weeks now. However, this last week it has emerged in the wild being dropped by something called the Angler exploit kit. So why is this such a change in the ransomware attack methodology? Mainly, researchers are telling us, because it uses the anonymous Tor network in order to hide the command and control centers.

CryptoLocker upped the anti by encrypting files on the target computer, persisting across reboots and also encrypting backups on connected networks. It also demanded the ransom in Bitcoin in order to, the victim would hope, release a key for decryption. When the Gameover Zeus malware operation was successfully taken down by law enforcement agencies from the US and Europe, it looked like CryptoLocker was dead in the water as this was a key distribution channel. It should come as no surprise, and is likely no coincidence, that at exactly the same time the first instances of underground marketing for Critroni were spotted by security researchers. Now emerging from the Russian enclave where it was first tested out, Critroni/Onion sells for 'just' $3000 …

Weclome simri

In the context of the security threatscape, both definitions work. That said, I always think of RAT as being Remote Access Trojan as that's how I have encountered it most in my dealings with security researchers/vendors and others.

Good to have you with us, welcome aboard.

Welcome!

Have another welcome from me :)

Hi Jacob, welcome to our community.

Power-user/advanced

Next... (yawn)

And, of course, be on top of your broader security posture as many successful FB account breaches will come by way of keylogging malware, social engineering etc etc.

Welcome Freddy

Welcome, I've not been to Bangalore for many years but have happy memories of the place...

Google it.

Next...

Riiiiiiight.

If you encrypted something, you can decrypt it can't you. If you've forgotten the password then ask your friend.

I don't get the logic in the open a new tab argument. If people are taken to a resource that answers their question, and that was the oinly reason they were on DaniWeb, then they would not have come back to us immediately anyway (unless they wanted to say thanks, in which case I imagine they will do anyway.) If they wanted to continue browsing at DaniWeb then having to type in daniweb.com is hardly going to stop them no matter where they have been beforehand.

And, anyway, sites that buck the accepted defualt browsing convention of opening in the same window/tab without asking me what I want to do are likely not to get my return custom anyway. It's something that annoys the heck out of me.

Are you sure it wasn't something at your end?

Bugs are, and always have been, a fact of life for the software developer. However, if Microsoft researcher Andrew Begel has his way, they could be a thing of the past. Last month a paper entitled 'Using Psycho-Physiological Measures to Assess Task Difficulty in Software Development' was published which Begel co-authored. This week, Begel spoke at the annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit on the subject.

Basically what Begel and his research colleagues are saying is that the existing work looking at dealing with programming errors tends to focus on the "post hoc identification of correlations between bug fixes and code" and this isn't working. Instead, his team suggests, a new approach is needed to address the very real and very costly problem of code bugs. The new approach in question being to try and "detect when software developers are experiencing difficulty while they work on their programming tasks" and then, of course, stop them before they can go on to introduce bugs into their code.

This makes sense, as far as addressing the reasons why errors are introduced in the first place. Think about it, as a developer you are often asked to work very long hours with an unmovable deadline to be met. Your work involves staring at a screen for hours on end, producing something that is part of a finished product which can contain millions of lines of code. Combine the physical and mental stress and it's hardly surprising that errors are made, and then …

I always thought you were odd, now there is proof ;-)

Two pairs dedicated for home use? Is that one for upstairs and one down, or one formal and one casual? When do you wear the slippers if you also have shoes? Are the shoes for moving around in and the slippers for when you have sat down?

ROFL

What errors are you getting?

1. Google for retail values.

2. eBay for real value.

That's it, surely, the same as anything else. If you are ready to sell then throw them up on eBay and the market will determine what the actual value (as in what people right now are prepared to pay right now) is.

The title of this post is: how to SEO a news website. Maybe there's a small clue in there?

shoes to wear in the house..

Also known as slippers :-)

That said, I wear by steel toecap para boots everywhere (indoors and out) and only take them off when I go to bed. Hate households where I am expected to remove my shoes before entering, so always wear totally minging socks just in case...

Welcome aboard