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How To Prevent Hacking? Surviving It!

bleuken — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 13:27:51 +0000

Recently a lot of websites are reported being attacked by several hackers from different part of the world. Even the government websites are said to be hacked (which I honestly doubt it and personally in my opinion, I believe that its an inside job, someone gave the access ). Now the possibilities that your websites or even your PCs can be hacked is great. Specially with the wide spread of malware and malicious codes like virus & worms that weakens the security barrier of the PCs and websites.

You might wonder why a SEO guy like me is concerned with this issue. Well, website’s ranking (and even traffic) can be affected negatively by this kind of problem. When the site is infected or suffers the hacking attack, it left a bad reputation on the site that makes your visitors avoid or abandon your site. Aside from that search engines today put a visible marking on their search results regarding the infection and the harm that it might cause to possible visitors.

Now, how to prevent it? Here’s some of the things that I think you need to take into considerations when you are building a shield for your personal computers and websites.

Enable your firewall on your operating systems to avoid unnecessary connection or access from intruders.
Patch your operating systems with latest updates.
Update the content management system of your website with the latest version.
Use strong password for the access details for both the Administrator or user password of your PC and for the website access. Usually a 12 or more character combination of alphabetic, numeric and symbols can build a strong password.
Never give your personal information to just anyone else who email you. Hackers usually use this to bypass or request for access details.
Do not open any attachment specially if you don’t know the sender. Use email clients that automatically prevent auto-viewing of attached files.
Avoid saving your password when asked by the browsers.

What if your website or PC is already hacked, what will you do? Here some of the basic things that you can do

Change the access details of your website or PC immediately.
Check your PC for possible infection of virus or malware. Remove it when found.
Restore recent back-up copy of your website. If it is not available, then let the technical guys remove all the infections, defaced pages or compromised files. This is very time consuming and its the reason why you should back-up your files always.
Patch your site or PC’s OS immediately if there’s an available update.

How To Prevent Hacking? Surviving It! is a post from: Bleuken.com

Removal and Prevention of Gumblar.cn Infections

bleuken — Wed, 06 May 2009 02:27:03 +0000

Gumblar.cn is a website is listed to be suspicious and contains several exploit scripts and trojans that might harm and infect computers. Google marked it as not safe for browsing. I first encountered on a website that I am working on and seen how and where it infects the website. What the trojan did on the site is it embeds its encrypted scripts on .HTML, .JS and .PHP files. You can find the Javascript of the trojan on .HTML files prior to the tag while it embeds itself on .JS files at the bottom most of the said script file. On .PHP files, it usually infects INDEX.PHP files and embeds itself either at the top or bottom of the file. I also found some infections on common .PHP files that are usually INCLUDEd as a constant file of the site. The current anti-virus that detects the said virus was AVAST Home Edition with Web Shield and Networking Shield ON.

Here’s what you will see if you will try to surf a site on Google Chrome that is infected by the trojan coming from the said site:

Now, how to remove it from your website? Well I found no reference on the net to remove it instantly so what I did is I removed the trojan scripts on each file (.JS, .HTML, INDEX.PHP) that I suspected for infection using Filezilla (FTP client program). For the WordPress infection, what I only did was I re-updated / upgraded the site to the latest version which causes the process to override existing files then remove the script from the WP-CONFIG.PHP file. This is the only file that is not overwritten by the said process that’s why I need to remove the trojan scripts manually.

As always, prevention is better than cure to avoid the pain of fixing the problems it cause to the site and to the owner. Here are some of my suggestions and recommendations I found from different web hosting sites regarding avoidance of hacking and malware infections on your site:

Change the file attributes of the files that doesn’t require writing permissions. I usually set my files to 755 attributes (MOD 755)
Update your antivirus virus database and enable or use network + web shield features at all times. Usually infection of websites starts from the local PC that uses to upload new files.
Read this PHP Security fixes recommended by a web hosting company. It contains comprehensive tips on how to avoid PHP exploits and hacks. Read it carefully and apply it if it is possible.

If you have any better solutions out there or any recommendations on dealing on this kind of exploits/hacks, feel free to leave it here. I am sure that a lot of people will really highly appreciated the help that you can provide.

Removal and Prevention of Gumblar.cn Infections is a post from: Bleuken.com

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Computer Crime, Can We Do Something About It?

bleuken — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 09:02:40 +0000

Computer Crimes and the Law

For the past decades, computers are really very useful in different aspect of our life. Almost everything right now are all computer based. Along with this improvement and convenience brought by computers to our lives are some hi-tech problems too. I am talking about “computer crimes” that is really started to become alarming everywhere. Even FBI sees these rise of computer crimes (read the article about this here in Reuters).

As far as I could remember the Philippines passed the E-Commerce law last 2000 which they quickly made into law after the “LOVE LETTER virus” or “ILOVEYOU virus” or “Love bug” outbreak. Imagine the law just passed when someone already committed the crime and only to discover that it is not yet a crime because there’s no law that governs it the time it was committed. It was a highly “pressurized” law – pressured by international community who were victimized by this virus. As of today, I never heard someone get caught of hacking, cracking, phreaking, virus creation or duplication (imagine in our place alone a lot of version of a single virus was spread by simply renaming the virus, I am talking about a VBScript virus that uses autorun.inf), phishing or email spamming and scamming. Maybe these crime committing dark geniuses are really hard to track down and the authorities are having trouble putting them to jail.

What now?

The question right now is how could we protect ourselves from this kind of crimes. If you’re always online and your life is online everyday, you are not immune to this kind of problem, no one is. I have several advice that might help you protect yourself from these forms of cyber crimes:

Install an anti-virus program. Despite some viruses can get through anti-virus protection, it is still better to have an anti-virus than no protection at all. Some viruses today are used by some hackers to steal some confidential information from your computer so it is better that you are not infected by it in any way possible. It is because when you are already infected by this computer virus even after it was cured, it leaves your PC vulnerable since it opens a lot of security holes on your computer. Giving you an “open wound” PC that is easy to be attacked.
Make use of the Firewall. If you could use a hardware type of firewall the better but if not try using a 3rd party firewall instead like the Comodo Firewall. This will protect your PC to be accessed remotely by unauthorized users.
Do not open nor reply to spam mails. They usually solicit confidential information from their victims.
Don’t reveal nor post your confidential information online such as social security number, bank account number or even your birth date, etc.
Just visit reputable websites. Do not open website addresses or URLs directly from email (specially your online bank or money websites) . Sometimes phishers used fake websites just to collect your private information such as your credit number and other. Type the address directly on the address bar to be sure.

Computer Crime, Can We Do Something About It? is a post from: Bleuken.com