Author Archives: Kathy Sweeney

Might not smell or test as sweet. Registering a domain name is fairly simple and relatively cheap, but there are a few important details to keep in mind when you are deciding on what your domain name should be.

The most important things are simple: keep it short, unique and relevant to your company. If your company name is Fritz and Sons Conglomerate Inc. “fritzandsons.com”, “Fritz-and-sons.net”, “Fritz.inc”, “fritz.com”, “FritzConglomerate.com”, even the acroynm “fsci.com” are all  domain names to consider, though a little bit of caution when creating  acroynms or running words together to avoid a domain name is saying more than you want it to

If you have a particular branding acronym, “catch phrase” or “buzz words”, such as “Never be on the Fritz with Fritz”, associated with your company you might consider “never-on-the-fritz.com”, unless someone has trademarked “Never on the Fritz”.

Never buy a domain name that is trademark protected. It’s fairly easy to do a search, if you are in doubt consult an attorney who specializes in trademark law. Trademarks and copyright infringements not only can lead you into court, they can also confuse visitors, customers and dilute your brand. It’s best to stick to unique phrases/wording that can easily be associated with your company and brand. Imagine buying and investing in a domain name only to find out thousands of development or advertising dollars later that you are building up a competitors brand or worse, liable for infringement. You might even want to consider creating your own trademark, to make sure your branding remains your property.

Valid characters for a domain name are letters, numbers and a dash (or hyphen) “-“.
Spaces and other special characters like the underscore “_”, exclamation mark “!”, or the ampersand “&” are not permitted.
Periods (or dots) are only used/allowed to denote the suffix, or top-level domain (TLD) or “Subdomains”.
The maximum length of a domain name can be up to 67 characters long – including the .com or other TLD,
BUT if you are using all 67 characters it is going to be too long for the average person to remember.
The “www.” is not a part of your domain name.
“www.yourcompany.com” is not a valid name you will have the option of using www.yourcompany.com when setting up your site.

How to Clean a Hacked Website

Traditionally “.com”, “.net”, “.org”, “.biz” are the more recognized top level domain names, but these days you can use almost anything as more and more TLD’s are being created every year. Whichever TLD you choose it is a good idea to grab the .com version of your name if available. The reason for snagging for the .com version is simply that people will often get confused and type in .com unthinkingly rather than or in addition to your .org or .company domain names. There is one TLD you should probably avoid and its “.biz”. Poor “.biz” has a bit of a bad reputation brought about by some shady practices used by some of its earliest actors and because of this reputation, a yourcompany.biz might not go over as well as you might hope.

So to sum it up: make it relevant to your brand, short sweet and snappy. Avoid lengthy names. Avoid trademarked names. Avoid becoming a dirty joke. Try to grab the .com even if you want the .org or other TLD.

Original Title: Two years later, what the Exploit Fest of 2014 Taught us…

WordPress Joomla Drupal, Magento .  You name the CMS  2014 was a big year for bots, brute force attack hacks and vulnerabilities, and unfortunately two years later, it seems that the uptick seen in 2014 was just an introduction to the future. Of course the internet has long been a place where this happens, and the almighty security guru’s have done a very decent job of keeping the rest of us informed about the threats, patching holes and educating the industry on how to batten down the hatches, of course, we can never be 100% certain what the next strain on security will be, what the method of attack or how long it will be before the a new pattern or outbreak becomes apparent and the security guru’s figure out how its being done this time.

In 2014 expressly though, it became apparent, that the perhaps the biggest hole in the internet, is web site owners that do not update.

How to Clean a Hacked Website

In January and March of 2014, security experts warned of the increase of probes for the  Joomla JCE vulnerability that has been known now for several years, and addressed by updates, but it would seem that many Joomla site’s didn’t get the memo, or chose to ignore it.  As a developer, I must admit this is lucrative. Please, feel free to call on me if your site gets hacked, and I will be more than happy to help. Honestly though, it would be far more cost effective for you and easier for me if you just update your site and plugins before you get hacked.  Into the Wild… .

In some reported instances, site’s have been hacked using an SQL (database) exploits and in some cases injecting an adminstrative user without a name sometimes that doesn’t show in the wordpress admin but has full privileges.  This gives them access to editing tools that allows them to change files and settings, by which they can add malware, bypass security and otherwise wreak havoc.

Unfortunately for you,  if you are on the same  shared server as a vulnerable site, you can be just as vulnerable as they are, not only for hacks but for email reputation and site penalties. In a perfect hosting environment,  to protect their other customers the shared servers, webhosts would have been alerting those clients update or vacate, but that is not how it works, usually.

The best defense is always a good offense, and this adds to the many reasons that  for you to  to keep their CMS software, plugins and themes updated and patched. If you look at your access logs, you can see the queries for vulnerable software and holes, they are searching for the low hanging fruit.  Don’t be fruit.

Update, whether your website still works or not.

You will be making the the internet  a better place.