Inland Pacific Consulting
VisitUsAt.com (dba Inland Pacific Consulting) is a development and hosting company serving the on-line demands of today's business. You will find us large enough to offer and support the latest technology, yet small enough for you to talk to.
We are here to answer the questions that will enable you to establish your business on the Internet and to collaborate with employees and clients in the easiest and most cost effective manner. If you are considering implementing the latest Microsoft collaboration tools; or simply looking for a new, more reliable hosting solution and collaboration service provider, VisitUsAt.com can help.
If you have any questions regarding collaboration services, web hosting, design or domain name services, please call 1-800-593-0234 toll free.
Monthly Archives: July 2009
Network Solutions Hack Compromises 573,000 Credit, Debit Accounts
Anyone that had an online store hosted by Network Solutions needs to read this article.
Network Solutions Hack Compromises 573,000 Credit, Debit Accounts
- Image by Jordan and Lee via Flickr
Hackers have broken into Web servers owned by domain registrar and hosting provider Network Solutions, planting rogue code that resulted in the compromise of more than 573,000 debit and credit card accounts over the past three months, Security Fix has learned.
Herndon, Va. based Network Solutions discovered in early June that attackers had hacked into Web servers the company uses to provide e-commerce services – a package that includes everything from Web hosting to payment processing — to at least 4,343 customers, mostly mom-and-pop online stores. The malicious code left behind by the attackers allowed them to intercept personal and financial information for customers who purchased from those stores, Network Solutions spokeswoman Susan Wade said.
Wade said the company is working with federal law enforcement and a commercial data breach forensics team to determine the cause and source of the break-in. The payment data stolen was captured from transactions made between March 12, 2009 and June 8, 2009.
Image by dfmartins via Flickr
On Friday, Network Solutions began notifying affected customers by e-mail and postal mail. Due to the potential high cost of notifying individual victims, the hosting company is offering to handle the notification of affected customers of the breached online stores. Forty-five states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws requiring organizations to notify consumers when a data breach or loss jeopardizes the security of personal and financial data, but the rules for complying with those laws differ from state to state.
“We feel terribly about it to burden them with the notification process, which can be kind of tricky because there is no one federal data breach statute,” Wade said.
Choosing and Protecting Passwords
Passwords are a common form of authentication and are often the only barrier between a user and your personal information. There are several programs attackers can use to help guess or “crack” passwords, but by choosing good passwords and keeping them confidential, you can make it more difficult for an unauthorized person to access your information.
Why do you need a password?
Image via Wikipedia
Think about the number of personal identification numbers (PINs), passwords, or passphrases you use every day: getting money from the ATM or using your debit card in a store, logging on to your computer or email, signing in to an online bank account or shopping cart…the list seems to just keep getting longer. Keeping track of all of the number, letter, and word combinations may be frustrating at times, and maybe you’ve wondered if all of the fuss is worth it. After all, what attacker cares about your personal email account, right? Or why would someone bother with your practically empty bank account when there are others with much more money? Often, an attack is not specifically about your account but about using the access to your information to launch a larger attack. And while having someone gain access to your personal email might not seem like much more than an inconvenience and threat to your privacy, think of the implications of an attacker gaining access to your social security number or your medical records.
Pitaschio: Tweaking Tool For Windows 7 Power Users
Pitaschio is a free utility for Windows that lets you tweak and customize Windows in several ways. This utility works great on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.
With Pitaschio, one can disable Windows, Insert, Alt, Caps Lock and Menu keys instantly. This utility lets you customize Windows desktop by changing icon text color, icon size (small icons), and a few other useful options. Along with this, it lets you place window only in screen, adjust transparency by wheel, minimize window to system tray, disable/enable minimize button, enable/disable maximize button, enable/disable close button.
Internet Explorer 8: Select text with the keyboard
In older versions of IE it was often difficult or impossible to select exactly the text you wanted to copy into an e-mail or a document. When you dragged the mouse to select text, you often selected adjacent paragraphs or columns also, even though you didn’t want them. IE8 finally solves this problem by imitating Firefox’s “caret browsing” feature, in which you select text by moving the arrow keys. Just press F7, or Page | Caret Browsing, and use the arrow keys or other navigation to find the place in the text where you want to start copying; hold down the Shift key and use the arrows or other navigation keys to extend the selection. Ctrl-C then copies the selected text to the clipboard. It would have been nice if Web browsers used F8 (the “extend selection” key in Microsoft Office) instead of F7 for this feature, but you can’t have everything.
Internet Explorer 8: Nine Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do – Solutions by PC Magazine
Internet Explorer 8: Block Ads with InPrivate Filtering
Block Ads with InPrivate Filtering and Third-Party Filters
A helpful new feature found in Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is the ability to block ads that appear on web pages–especially the ones that seem to ‘follow’ you from site to site by tracking your browsing with cookies.
Image via Wikipedia
First, turn on InPrivate Filtering by using Safety | InPrivate Filtering Settings and select Automatically Block. Click OK.
Next, add a Registry setting that turns on InPrivate Filtering by default so that you don’t have to turn it on every time you start up IE8. In Notepad, create a text file with these three lines:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Safety\PrivacIE]
"StartMode"=dword:00000001
Save this file to your desktop with a name like “FilterOn.reg”; right-click on it; choose Merge.
Next, search the Web for files named Adblock for IE8.zip or EasyListIE8.zip, or search for “ie8 adblock xml list” or similar strings. You are looking for links to downloadable XML files converted from recent filtering lists created for Firefox‘s AdBlock Plus. Download one or more of these XML files to your desktop—you can use more than one without problems—and look at the files in Notepad to make sure that they’re standard text files and not a dangerous executable program (scan them with your antivirus app first, just in case). In IE8, go to Tools | Manage Add-Ons, and click on InPrivate Filtering. Click the Import button, navigate to your downloaded XML file and click Open. IE8 will take a few seconds to process the list. Click Close. Now visit any normally ad-heavy site and enjoy the view of the site with few or no ads.
Internet Explorer 8: Nine Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=881bb24b-18c7-45dd-b60f-e2624712b739)
Critical JavaScript vulnerability in Firefox 3.5
Microsoft Internet Explorer has long been criticized as ‘insecure’ and vulnerable to attack while Mozilla Firefox was touted as the browser to use to keep your web browsing and your computer safe. It doesn’t appear that this is the case any longer. Make sure you apply all available patches as soon as they become available–for all your software–to keep your computer secure and less vulnerable to attack.
07.14.09 – 10:15am
Issue
A bug discovered last week in Firefox 3.5’s Just-in-time (JIT) JavaScript compiler was disclosed publicly yesterday. It is a critical vulnerability that can be used to execute malicious code.
Impact
The vulnerability can be exploited by an attacker who tricks a victim into viewing a malicious Web page containing the exploit code. The vulnerability can be mitigated by disabling the JIT in the JavaScript engine. To do so:
- Enter
about:configin the browser’s location bar. - Type
jitin the Filter box at the top of the config editor. - Double-click the line containing
javascript.options.jit.contentsetting the value to false.
Note that disabling the JIT will result in decreased JavaScript performance and is only recommended as a temporary security measure. Once users have been received the security update containing the fix for this issue, they should restore the JIT setting to true by:
- Enter
about:configin the browser’s location bar. - Type
jitin the Filter box at the top of the config editor. - Double-click the line containing
javascript.options.jit.contentsetting the value to true.
Alternatively, users can disable the JIT by running Firefox in Safe Mode. Windows users can do so by selecting Mozilla Firefox (Safe Mode) from the Mozilla Firefox folder.
Why Do Online Shoppers Abandon Purchases?
A new survey released this past week revealed that nearly half of online shoppers have abandoned their carts multiple times in the past three weeks due to high shipping costs, security concerns and lack of convenience. The average cost of abandoned goods in U.S. shopping carts is $109. This data was supplied by PayPal.
Image by Getty Images via Daylife
High shipping costs was cited as the largest single reason for cart abandonment. While nothing could have prevented one-third of shoppers from abandoning purchases, the survey found that providing shipping costs up-front might have caused 40 percent to complete the purchase. To help merchants encourage shoppers to purchase, PayPal today announced a new Express Checkout feature – the PayPal Instant Update API. By integrating the new API, merchants can show order details earlier in the process including shipping options, insurance choices and tax totals.
“To get shoppers to buy, it’s critical merchants make the checkout experience easy and costs transparent,” said Eddie Davis, senior director of SMB merchant services, PayPal. “Our new PayPal Instant Update API will help merchants get customers the information they need up-front to drive sales.”
The survey also uncovered signs that the economy still has shoppers wary about clicking the “purchase” button. More than one-third of respondents abandoned checkout because they didn’t plan for all of the expenses; while more than 25 percent left the site to search for a coupon. However, one-third of shoppers later returned to the same site to buy. An additional 20 percent purchased the items at a brick and mortar store or competitor’s Web site.