It happens to the best of us, I guess. Late Wednesday, the cable company Comcast had their website redirected to a page created by hackers. Members of the the hacker group Kryogeniks were apparently really proud of blocking Comcast customers from using their web-based email service, potentially affecting up to 14 million customers.

The hackers somehow obtained the username and password for Comcast’s domain name registration account with NetworkSolutions. They logged into Comcast’s account and updated the settings to redirect their home page.

According to sources at NetworkSolutions, Comcast’s account was not hacked nor compromised. Currently, it’s unclear as to how they acquired the username and password.

I’m taking away a valuable lesson from this unfortunate incident: Guard my usernames and passwords with my life. I’ll continue to use my encrypted password manager software, 1Password. Another effective option is to periodically change passwords associated with sensitive accounts.

WordPress 2.5.1 has been released. As many of our clients know, WordPress is a great piece of software that we can install for you to give you the ability to run a blog on your website. It’s easy to use and includes plenty of support if you have questions.

Updating software such as WordPress is also a smart way to patch newly discovered security issues. A security vulnerability can leave holes for hackers to enter.

Blogs are an excellent way for you to add timely content to any website. Contact us now for an estimate on your custom WordPress install and become a blogger.

According to a recent post on Macworld.com, Google’s Blogger service is getting hacked by spammers sending coded instructions. The spammers are able to create new pages on the Blogger service to showcase their usual junk products. The surprise element for me is the fact that the spammers are able to overcome and break the CAPTCHA, the funky graphical mix of numbers and letters that must be entered to complete account registration. This was created to limit account registrations to humans. CAPTCHA may now be a thing of the past.

Those darn spammers are getting smarter by the minute!

Dogpaw Studio clients with sites running dynamic applications like WordPress for blogs, Joomla! for content management systems, or phpBB for forums must also be on the lookout for hackers with bad intentions. One of the best measures to take in the fight against spammers/hackers is to routinely make backups of server files and databases. If a malicious attack hit one of your accounts, we could merely restore your site from its backup version. This can make the difference between requiring 1-2 hours of work and many, many hours of work to restore a website.

For about $45, we perform routine backup procedures for many of our clients, which include file backup as well as archiving up to two backup versions on multiple hard drives. Fortunately, we’ve only had one site hacked in the eight years we’ve been in business. Security against hackers and spammers have come to be a reality of the internet, as shown in the unfortunate example above regarding Google’s Blogger service. The good news is that our clients can rest assured that if they experience a hack, we can easily and efficiently restore their website using one of our routine backups.

Another smart way to patch security vulnerabilities is to update software when developers release new versions. All of the blog, forum, and content management system software that we install can be updated by us.

Be smart! Contact us about our routine backup procedures or software updates today!