small business web design

Evil the Hacker responsible for Destroying Distribute IT has been caught

admin — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 11:27:25 +0000

‘Evil’ the hacker refused bail over NBN plot

AN UNEMPLOYED truck driver with the online moniker ”Evil” hacked into one of the national broadband network’s service providers and had control of its entire system for at least six weeks, police allege.

In the first solo hacking case of its kind in Australia, federal police yesterday arrested 25-year-old David Cecil at his home in the NSW central west town of Cowra.

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Police quiz David Cecil in his home. Photo: Australian Federal Police

He hasa been charged with 50 offences over alleged incursions into Platform Networks, one of the first 12 service providers selected for the contentious $36 billion NBN trials.

Police allege Mr Cecil, whose IT skills are self-taught, was acting alone and spent up to 20 hours a day on his home computer.

”He had basically taken over their system,” the federal police Assistant Commissioner, Neil Gaughan, alleged.

Police in the suspect’s house yesterday. Photo: Australian Federal Police

”If he wished to, he could have actually taken down the whole [of Platform's] network.”

Mr Gaughan said it did not appear Mr Cecil had access to any commercial-in-confidence information, but it will be alleged he had been ”mapping the whole background of the IT system”.

While some known hacking groups overseas had ultimately used their access to extort money, Mr Cecil’s sole motivation appeared to be bragging rights, police allege. He had unsuccessfully applied for jobs in the information technology industry, Mr Gaughan said.

”He’s basically saying: ‘You don’t need formal qualifications,”’ Mr Gaughan said. ”He’s sitting at his desk 20 hours a day from what we can gather.”

Mr Cecil was also known to boast about his hacking successes on chat sites, police will allege.

Police began investigating hacking attacks in January this year when the University of Sydney’s website was breached and its home page vandalised. Some ”high-level” corporate web pages were also accessed.

The investigation covered the permanent loss of 4080 Australian websites following a break-in at the domain registrar and web host company Distribute.IT. Four servers were ”unrecoverable” following the incident.

Mr Cecil used computer programs to randomly generate passwords and ‘’social engineering” – making phone calls to gain security information – to access Platform Network’s system, the federal police allege.

Police said Platform’s security and back-up systems were strong enough to withstand an attack and that the broadband network was not under threat at any time.

Platform, which has about 200 wholesale customers, took preventative measures to defend their system. ”We do whatever we need to do to make sure that our customers are protected,” the managing director, David Hooton, said.

But Mr Gaughan warned learning how to hack was ”fairly easy” and all companies were now open to the threats it poses.

”I think recent events have shown that any company is susceptible to hacking,” he said. ”If we are having people getting into organisations such as the CIA, every organisation is potentially a target. These systems are only as good as the weakest link.”

Mr Cecil was last night charged with 49 counts of unauthorised access to restricted data and one count of unauthorised modification of data. He is due to face Orange Local Court today.

A spokesman for NBN Co Limited, the company rolling out the National Broadband Network, said: “NBN Co has evaluated its systems and controls and can confirm the National Broadband Network was not affected by this incident.

“The company said to have been involved has not yet connected any services to the NBN.

“NBN Co works closely with appropriate law enforcement and government agencies to ensure the security and protection of the National Broadband Network. We welcome the AFP’s ongoing efforts in fighting cybercrime.”

http://www.theage.com.au/technology/security/police-charge–lone-hacker-over-nbn-plot-20110726-1hyoy.html

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Clickable website phone number on iPhone and Android Phones

admin — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 11:26:52 +0000

If you are wondering how to make a phone number on a website clickable when viewing it via your mobile phone use the following HTML code:

Call 03 9010 5764

This is what the code looks like on your iphone:

Call 03 9010 5764

Just change the number to the one you want.

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How Strong is Your Call To Action?

admin — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 09:44:52 +0000

When you land on a page, what catches your eye first? Is it that big, fat, yellow “Sign Up” button staring arrogantly at you? Or is it the average-sized one that blends into the background amidst a clutter of words? Whatever caught your attention, you will decide within the next 3 seconds if you’re going to stay and explore or leave.

This online behavior can be understood with Seth Godin’s example of the bananas and the monkeys, where the objective is for the monkey to find the banana within 3 seconds (before it gives up):

“Force yourself to design each and every page with one and only one primary objective. That’s the banana. Make it big. Make it blue (or red). Make it obvious.”

A call-to-action is a goal you want your website visitors to be compelled to do. Since it’s almost always designed in the form of a button, so lets discuss what makes a Great Button great!

What makes a Great Button great?

The only reason your site exists is to get customers to pile up their shopping cart, sign up for that mailing list, or download that free ebook. So make that button as big as you can to get your customers’ attention. Go ahead and play with the colors (see more examples)- the greater the contrast, the more eye catching it is, the better your conversions.

Help them find the banana

Tempt them with the banana by placing it in the most obvious part of the website, such as the centre. You don’t need an eye-tracking device to figure out where they are looking – if you do, you have a very cluttered page screaming for revision.

Can you spot the call to action here? I can’t.

One way to tell where their eyes would be, is where the main message (those with the biggest font), or biggest picture is. Put the call to action right in the middle, like this:

Put it above the fold if you can. Humans lose attention fast, and most don’t bother scrolling down the page.

To prove it (and to satisfy our egos), we did a couple of tests using a large button above the fold for our email campaigns and even our homepage. We added an even larger one at the end of the page. Guess which button snatched a whopping 80% of the clicks?!

Cut right down to the chase

Use an action verb, and urgent active ones like “Signup”, “Download”, “Subscribe”, “Register.”

To create a sense of urgency, tempt them with an irresistible offer that expires:

“Offer ends 31st Dec”
“For the first 200 customers only!”
“Free shipping till Valentine’s Day.”

K.I.S.S.

Keep It Short & Simple! Less means more. The lesser your words, the stronger your call to action. Be succinct.

What sucks:

What doesn’t suck:
Make the banana simply irresistible

What’s the best you can offer? “Free”? Put your offer into the call to action, or around the call to action.

You might want to refrain from generic terms like “call now” or “buy now”. Be specific and use inviting phrases such as “call now to learn more.”

Different people like different bananas. So to find out which bananas are more attractive to your crowd. AB test the button to death with tools such as Google Website Optimizer. You’ll be surprised with the findings you get. More importantly, an increase in conversion rate from 5% to 6% means an overall 20% increase in your conversions!

Just one button

Design the page with one and only one objective. If you have to have more than one objective, prioritize them.

We don’t want to confuse our visitors with many call to action buttons. A few pages have multiple call to actions. The best way to go about prioritizing them is to add a striking color.

The example shows two objectives for the call to action. But the ‘Buy It’ button is more prominent than the ‘Download Now’.

As much as you can, limit your call to action to one objective. If you have multiple objectives, the last thing you want your home page to look like is this :

Build trust around the button

Many people are wary of giving away their information. Let customers know that you value their privacy. Use a privacy statement, make terms and conditions explicit.

You want to give customers the confidence to click, especially the first-time visitors who are not familiar with your business. You can create confidence easily by displaying trust seals (that almost everyone recognises) near important fields.
If you have a shopping cart button, reinforce its “trustworthiness” with logos like Visa, Mastercard, Paypal or Verisign. Trust seals have proven to increase conversion rates and reduce shopping cart abandonment, so make full sure of that.

This page has been taken from:

http://blog.zopim.com/?p=1173&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-strong-is-your-call-to-action

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DistributeIT outages was it Evil the Hacker? 14/06/2011 – Industry News

admin — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 04:28:19 +0000

Over the past 3 weeks DistributeIT’s hosting services have been constantly interrupted.

On the 25th May DistributeIT stated:
“There was a problematic account on the Hurricane server which was doing a full backup as well as doing malicious script and bringing down the server to a halt. We have since suspended the account and warned the owner of doing backup during business hours and the malicious script. This should have been fixed now.”

A customer of DistributeIT confirms that after calling them asking why the services were down yet again they stated on 31st May 2011:
“There has been an increase in security issues and we have had to look over entire servers to shutdown offending accounts. We’re further hardware to the system in order to further battle these types of situations also.”

According to DistributeIT Twitter posts on the 31st May they stated that it was due to:
Scheduled Maintenance: Shared servers [Tornado, Drought] completing migration over to the new Dell EqualLogic SAN.
Things progressively got worse on Saturday afternoon (11/06/2011) the DistrubuteIT website was hacked into and the homepage was defaced with the alleged following words according to a blogger post:

OWNED BY EVIL AT EFNET YOU MOTHER flappERS NEED TO GET A CLUE BEFORE YOU RUN A BUSINESS YOUR SECURITY IS HORRIBLE !!!!! THE ONE AND ONLY EVIL AT EFNET I AM BACK MOTHER flappERS!!! The Outage the other day WAS NOT an upgrade they got HACKED and fabricated it with a lame excuse….

In potentially related news a hacker called Evil was allegedly responsible for hacking into Sydney University website around the 19th January 2011. (Information from Sydney Morning Herald).

“The university confirmed its website had been hacked three times during the past week but would not comment on the motive or whether security weaknesses remained.”

“The home page was replaced on Saturday with an offensive message that taunted the site’s administrator for lax security.”

“The hacker, who has nicknamed himself ”Evil”, later boasted in a chat room of having a back door to the university’s information technology systems that would allow future access.”

“Evil said he hacked into the system from Brazil for money. He claimed to have gained control of three-quarters of the network and to have breached security three times.”

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Getting your website listed on Google

admin — Wed, 18 May 2011 04:01:02 +0000

Great video that explains how to get your website listed on the first page of Google Search Results.The video also presents some interesting information on
where peoples eyes look on a page and what listings get the most clicks. Hotspots on a page, well worth worth watching.

Also the video touches on where to download the SEO Starter Guide. It is a free document from Google (just Google SEO Starter Guide).

Other related videos you may find useful include:

Why to claim your listing on Google Places:

http://youtu.be/p-tXRH5Xufg

How to get listed on Google Places:
http://youtu.be/kb27YNRT5yk

Small Business Websites - Web Design Mornington Peninsula – Web Design Dandenong

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Changes to Google’s Search Engine Algorithm

admin — Tue, 10 May 2011 03:10:39 +0000

A few months ago Google made major changes to its algorithm called Panda Update that targets “low quality” sites. Google wants to eliminate copy & paste practices of some webmasters to build their websites.

Post Panda research shows that websites with non-original content are downgraded in Google rankings as well as websites that are linking to them.

Here are some sample links that show how services suffered after Google’s Panda introduction.

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/110310-092005

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-farmer-update-analysis-of-winners-vs-losers

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/110413-131714

Also a good YouTube Video:

Copied content that has been taken from other sites is no longer a good long-term strategy. Such websites are taking advantage of content written by others and not adding value to internet users.

It is worthwhile to take the time to create original content that will let you increase your ranking.

Creating new, fresh quality content is a number rule of getting your website ranked by Google. Not everyone is good at writing content or has good copywriter skills. If you need help with your website content then contact Sandra. She has done a great job for many of my clients.

http://sandraslavec.com.au/

On the whole, Google believe the changes will lead to improvements in the long run.

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Google Places Image Size

admin — Tue, 03 May 2011 11:06:55 +0000

What size should my images be to appear correctly on Google Places? The answer is 1 to 1 aspect ratio.

If you want to be found locally you need to add your business to Google Places. Uploading images to Google Places and getting the images to appear properly without being stretched or distored is tricky. Google help states that images need to be less than 1024 X 1024. Notice the aspect ratio is 1:1

That means your image will appear best as a square. So if you want to add your image make the width and height the same length. It took me several hours to figure this out. e.g. width 300 height 300 or width 689 height 689…etc you get the picture!

Also if you add an image to Google Places and it doesnt upload/ appear, and all you see is a cross where the image should be. Right click your mouse and and choose the option ‘Show Image’. The image will then display. Sometimes it takes a few seconds after doing this.

Small Business Websites | Website Design Mornington Peninsula

Editing Pictures for your Website – Free Graphics Program

admin — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 03:53:10 +0000

Do you want to modify your website images before uploading them to your website? Popular programs include Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks.

GIMP has been developed by a group of volunteers. They have created a polished, easy to use image editor for free. Yes that’s right a FREE graphic design software program!

Each time you use it will get easier. As with any new program there is a learning curve which is unavoidable.

Features include channels, layers and masks, filters and effects, tabbed palettes, editable text tools, perspective clone, improved printing, and color operations such as levels.

This free graphic design program is comparable to the popular paid programs such as Photoshop. GIMP is great for web designers or DIY web developers or any Content Management System (CMS) Website Owner not wanting to spend money.

You can easily create and edit professional quality digital images for yourself. Click on the link below to download GIMP.

Download free program to edit pictures for your website

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The Internet Show – Social Media World 4-5 May 2011

admin — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 02:59:09 +0000

Are you wanting to know how to use Social Media for your Business? Is your website leveraging off Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or any other social media platform?

Social Media World @ The Internet Show is a two day conference that will run at the Internet Show. Australia’ s Internet Business Event. The Show is dedicated solely to covering internet related issues for business. It provides the ideal environment to learn form the experts and gain hands-on Experience with the latest products and solutions.

You can register now for FREE and attend a number of educational seminars. The show will showcase the lastest products and solutions:

www.internetshow.com.au

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YouTube Website

admin — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 02:52:23 +0000

Do you want your own YouTube Videos posted on your website? Thankfully technology is now making this an easy task for any website owner.

You can create you own YouTube Account/Channel for free. Just go to wwwYouTube.com.au and sign up.

If you want to add your own video content we recommend the Flip Mino Video Camera it is sooooo easy to use.

Just plug and play. (it plugs in to the USB drive on your computer). No installation needed. To record you just click the record button then stop button. The camera is so small it fits in your pocket. No batteries needed, recharges when you plug it in. High defintion video footage 720 DPI so you can create professional looking video footage. To upload to YouTube you just click the YouTube button enter your password and username and your done! It’s that easy. It retails at around $295 AUS in Harvey Norman but you can pick one up off www.Ebay.com.au for about $150.

websites for small business

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