Category: information

Unwanted Spam Links

This is not about spam emails or scam emails with dodgy links in them.

This is about finding that someone has added spam links into your website without permission.

Hackers can insert spam links into your website – to gain a better ranking on search engines. The more inbound links a site receives, the higher the placement of the target web site in search results. Spam links are typically inserted into the database content in plain text, though they can also be deliberately obscured to make finding them more difficult.

Spam links can be inserted in site files or databases, so determining if your site is infected can often be done by simply reading the pages and looking for  inappropriate links.

The most common spam links are:-

  • Prescription drugs
  • Online gambling
  • Essay writing services
  • Film & TV downloads
  • Fake designer goods
  • Weight loss products
  • Adult content

Finding and Removing Spam Links

This means painstaking review of the code to find the inserted links. The links may be  inserted as typical hypertext links or they may be disguised by JavaScript for example. Determine which links are not relevant to your site and remove them.

For hackers to have inserted these links into your website means there must be vulnerabilities that they exploited. You need to find these vulnerabilities and fix them or the hackers may return.

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The Honey APP

A lot of people collect discount coupons – from newspapers and magazines but increasingly from coupon websites. There are numerous websites promising to give you the latest and best discount coupons off products at your favourite stores and it can take a lot of time searching for the discounts you want.

An entrepreneur tired of that process and created Honey.

It’s not an APP in the usual sense – it’s a browser extension so it adds on to your browser and it watches the stores you visit and the products you buy and finds and applies the relevant discount coupons automatically.

Honey is a free browser extension that automatically finds and applies coupon codes at checkout for over 30,000 shopping sites. It also instantly find better prices on Amazon and offers Honey Gold at many stores for it’s U.S. members.

Once Honey is installed, you will see the Honey icon in the top right corner turn orange on Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Edge when you’re on a shopping site that is supported by Honey.

That seems straightforward but there is also Honey Gold for US users.

The idea is that Honey makes money by getting a commission from merchants and then giving a portion of it back to the users as points which can be redeemed for dollar amounts credited to gift cards for stores such Amazon, Walmart, Target, eBay, Nordstrom, and Sephora.

User reviews say Honey does work and saves them money on shopping online.

It doesn’t work with all stores of course and you may not want a browser extension to be watching your shopping habits even though they emphatically say they do not sell or share customer data in any way.

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Stupid Automated Comments

Anyone with a website that allows people to make comments, is likely to be familiar with comments appearing that make no sense.

May be these are from people struggling with a second language or maybe from idiots, but quite often they are from automated systems that churn out comments from sets of standard phrases and try to load them on websites against old blog posts, articles etc.

Why do they do this?

Mostly to try to get web links onto Internet sites – maybe to their own website or blog or to one they are being paid to get links for. People pay only a few dollars for hundreds of back links so it cannot be a careful process and the comments must be mass produced and automated.

Here’s a few examples from recent stupid comments.

  • It’s not my first time to pay a quick visit this web site, i am browsing this site dailly and get nice facts
    from here daily.
  • This slot game has 5 reels and a massive 20
  • I need to to thank you for this fantastic read!! I certainly loved every little bitof it. I’ve got you bookmarked to check out new things you pos
  • I don’t even know how I ended up here, but I thought this post was good.I do not know who you are but definitely you are going to a famous blogger if you are not already  Cheers!
  • I’m not that much of a online reader to be honest but your blogs really nice, keep it up!I’ll go ahead and bookmark your website to come back in the future. All the best
  • Hey there! Would you mind if I share your blog with my Facebookgroup? There’s a lot of folks that I think would really  appreciate your  Please let me know. Cheers

The comments are always against old posts as they know that Google will largely ignore comments against new blog posts so as to stop people over populating their own posts with comments.

The comments are anything the scammer thinks will be accepted. But never accept such comments or you may find your site is deluged by random meaningless comments and that will annoy any genuine readers.

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How to Stay Safe from Ransomware

Ransomware is when a hacker gets software onto your computer that can lock you out or encrypt the data files. Once the attack has succeeded, the hacker puts up a message screen on the computer announcing the attack and demanding a payment be made in order to get the decryption key or password to unlock the files.

Most of these attacks are the encrypting type and examples include CryptoLocker, Locky and CrytpoWall.

Ransomware commonly uses multiple evasion techniques to avoid being found by anti-virus programmes and is often able to spread from one computer to another on the same network.

The primary protection against ransomware is up to date anti-virus and anti-malware software and regular backups. Plus, you can consider the following:-

  • If your anti-virus or anti-malware has anti-ransomware options then enable that protection
  • Do regular scans of all drives
  • Ensure any important files and data are also copied onto Internet storage or other external storage
  • Never click on links in emails unless you are sure they are safe
  • Never open email attachments that you do expect
  • Delete spam emails and anything suspicious
  • Beware dodgy websites that may download drive-by malware.

In conclusion, ransomware is a real problem – don’t be caught out with out of date backups.

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Why Do People Fall for Romance Scams?

Romance scams are someone is seeking a partner in romance on dating websites, social media or elsewhere are conned into believing that someone online is the right person for them, but that person is a scammer who has created a fake profile etc. in order to entice people and this in time leads to fraud.

For some scammers this is a long term game they play for fun and money and for some it’s a large scale operation carried out on an industrial scale where they respond to large numbers of men and women and in time reduce that to the most promising victims.

These scams have been around for a very long time and were common 20 years ago and more in the classified  section of magazines and newspapers.

Nowadays, the scammers target their victims mostly through social media and dating sites.

They create the perfect match using pictures copied from the Internet of unsuspecting individuals, adding fake profiles and interests etc and responding to large numbers of men and women.

Scammers create fake online profiles designed to lure you in victims. They use fake names, borrowed photos of someone attractive and a fake back story – all designed to appeal to you.  Quite often, they use a story of a military or ex military person and generally the fake person works overseas – to provide a reason why they cannot meet you in person.

Why Do People Fall For These Scams?

The possibility of love can make you overlook obvious danger signals. Seemingly meeting someone online who is perfect for you and has time for you, is loving and makes it clear they want you can be hard to resist. Many people who consider themselves sensible and level-headed fall for these tricks.

Scammers will put in the effort to get you to trust them – maybe through loving messages, small gifts, thoughtful reminders, personal details etc. In some cases this can go on for months.

Then they try to get money out of you.  Maybe by claiming they have been mugged and lost the months salary or something valuable was stolen or they need money to get a passport so they can visit you or to buy a permit from a corrupt official so they can leave their country.

It can be simpler though – just asking for money to do something for you or for you to set-up a joint bank account or a bank account in your country in their name which they will transfer money to.  (These accounts are then used for money laundering and the Police may arrest you when it is found out).

Warning Signs of Fake Romance 

  • They very quickly ask you to take the conversation off the dating site to use telephone, messaging or email instead
  • They ask you to wire money using a money transfer service such as Western Union. These payments are untraceable and cannot be got back
  • They ask you to set up a new bank account in your name or in their name or in joint names

Be careful.

`If you have fallen for any of these tricks, do let me know, by email.

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Google Play Protect

Google say that Google Play Protect is the most widely deployed mobile threat protection service in the world, but that’s not so surprising as its free on all Android phones and there are a lot of those around.

Google Play Protect is Google’s built-in malware protection for Android

Google say it works constantly to keep your device, data and apps safe. It automatically scans your device and makes sure that you have the latest in mobile security, so you can rest easy.

It scans and verifies over 50 billion apps every day

Are There Problems?

Google Play Protect is supposed to protect users from malicious apps in the Google Play Store — but of 20 Android programs evaluated by AV-Test, Google Play Protect did not perform well at identifying malware.

Those results come from AV-Test, a Germany-based security firm, which periodically evaluates antivirus programs for Windows, Mac OS, Android and Linux.

AV-Test scores each Anti-Virus suite out of a possible 13 points: six for protection, six for usability and the one remaining point for extra features. Earning eight points is enough to secure at least a tentative recommendation from the company. Google Play Protect did not perform well. However the other products are anti-virus and Pay Protect is not intended to be that.

Google Play Protect does protect but do not relay on it for anti-virus protection as it falls down in that area.

If you have any experiences with scam APPS do let me know, by email.

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