ejcross.com » Security

Free Norton Antivirus

elliott — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 03:39:00 +0000

I was looking around for a free antivirus solution today as the setup I have on my computer is about to expire. I have tried several different antivirus programs and each has their own benefits and problems. So, I found a site that offers a lot of different programs for free, including leading antivirus solutions for your computer and more.

I had tried the Google Pack a long time ago, like when it first came out and I wasn’t impressed. However, I just found out that it has free Norton Antivirus software as part of it’s redesigned package. Plus there is lots more, like Picasa photo editor (really nice) and more.

The nice thing I found was with the free Norton Antivirus there wasn’t a long download time, and it was really free. Head on over and download your own copy of the free Norton Antivirus.

Massive comment spam problem solved

elliott — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 03:14:49 +0000

Over the last couple of weeks, I have noticed an increase in my comment spam that has been caught by Akismet. Now, I’m not a super blogger getting thousands of comments a day, so I’m talking about getting over 400 comment spam in the last two weeks.

Comment spam can be annoying, but I can tell you I wouldn’t get rid of my Akismet for anything after this episode.

I have noticed an increase in my comment spam over the last two months, with the most dramatic increase coming in the last two weeks. It wasn’t much for me to get 4 or 5 comment spam trapped each day, so life was good. The last couple of weeks have really sucked for me, as I was getting 25 or 30 comment spam in a day.

That might not seem like a lot, but I also found a few comments in there that were false positives by the Akismet system. I was able to recover those easily, which is another good reason to check your Akismet logs.

What I found was I was receiving a ton of the comment spam from one post. I’m not sure how the spammers work, but I can only guess that somehow they found the page and it made it into their spam box and it was shared with tons of other spammers out there. I was getting all sorts of stuff, from blank comments to lists a mile long promising me that there were numerous women anxiously awaiting to service my every need. Huh, I guess they are gonna cut my grass and wax the car! Sweet…

Since the post was an older one that hadn’t received much traffic, all I needed to do, and did was go and turn off the comments and pings under the “Discussion” tab for that particular article. I used the integrated feature in the Akismet Spam section of the comments tab in the Wordpress administration panel. Just hover or click on the “view post” link and you will see which one is causing you a lot of problems.

After I turned off the comments and pings on that older post, hopefully the spam servers are choking on the fact that they can’t send me any more seductive offers or risk free methods to increase my “manhood” size.

All I can say is I’m not sure why that one post was targeted, but it was, and I hope you can find it useful to try this method to cut down on your comment spam.

Secure and Accessible Contact Form for Wordpress

elliott — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 13:28:09 +0000

As a site owner with several sites, one of the most annoying things that I have encountered is trying to use a contact form on a site that allows for a lot of spam to get through. One of the best solutions for this that I have found is a really neat, simple and thorough contact form solution written by Mike Cherim and Mike Jolley.

The Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form v.2.0WP is a Wordpress plugin that really secures your contact form on your site. This plugin has a ton of features, like an easy configuration page that allows for simple setup for your Wordpress blog. The Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form also is written to be extremely accessible, so that screen readers and other accessible technology devices can still use it.

This form also has 16 security measures in place to help alleviate spam and hacking of the form, which is great. One of the problems that I still see while surfing the internet is people that put their email address directly on their site. While Google and other search engines use spiders to index your site, so do spammers. However they use spiders to harvest email addresses that are hard coded into the site, thereby allowing them to spam your email address.

I have been using this form now for several years on my sites, and I can honestly say that I have never received a spam contact through this form. It works like a charm, and I hope you find it useful for your site as well.

You can get the Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form v.2.0WP from Mike Cherim’s Green Beast site, and find lots of configuration settings, tutorials, and support on his site.

Internet Explorer security flaw affects Firefox

elliott — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 00:24:51 +0000

I was perusing Information Week as I often visit them due to the wealth of topics when I came across this. If you have both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox on your computer, you could be at risk for a URL flaw caused by Internet Explorer passing malicious scripting code to Firefox.

According to the Mozilla Security Blog dated July 10, 2007 if a user visits a site that sends Internet Explorer (IE) a malicious script, it can then pass that script to Firefox and allow execution of the code. To quote a brief excerpt from the Mozilla Security Blog:

The vulnerability is exposed when a user browses to a malicious web page in Internet Explorer and clicks on a specially crafted link. That link causes Internet Explorer to invoke another Windows program via the command line and then pass that program the URL from the malicious webpage without escaping the quotes. This can cause data to be passed accidentally from the malicious web page to the second Windows program. In the specific attack described in the report, Internet Explorer sends URL data to Firefox. If the data is crafted a certain way it will allow remote code execution in Firefox.

Mozilla Security personnel are stating that this does not affect people who use Firefox as their primary browser. Both Microsoft and Mozilla are apparently arguing about whose fault it is, but Mozilla is taking the lead in fixing the issue in their browser, which should be repaired in the 2.0.0.5 version of Firefox. Just another reason to keep your browser and operating systems up to date!

Read the Information Week article and also see the full Mozilla Security blog article for more information.