These days, one of people’s greatest concerns regarding online activities is security. Spyware, malware, adware, viruses, trojans, key loggers etc provide an easy way for certain unscrupulous people and companies to get into our lives and even steal valuable personal info.

Let me relate a small story that recently occurred in my family. My nine year old daughter was accused of cyber bullying a child via facebook. I checked into the time that it occurred and discovered that it was 4:00 am, a time when my daughter was not even online. She had inadvertently downloaded a keylogger which gave someone access to her facebook account. Naturally, I cleaned her computer and changed her password. Well, I guess it was a relatively harmless way for her to discover the privacy dangers associated with the internet. She will be much more careful what she downloads in future because she was very upset about the situation.

It’s so easy to have a breach of security online. Just look at all the emails that come in claiming to be from your online bank, ebay, paypal etc that request you to log in via a link in the email… Look out, someone is trying to get a keylogger onto your system. Not only can they use the information garnered by a keylogger to access your online banking, paypal or ebay accounts, they can use it to steal your identity with all the potential legal repercussions that involves.

Then of course, there is the damage that can be done by malicious viruses including corrupted software, file deletions etc. All of these things can be a real pain!

Yup, it’s scary out there in cyberspace!

Thankfully, it’s easy enough to get a 30 day Internet Security 2010 FREE Download from Kaspersky. Kaspersky is a relatively new kid on the block for internet security applications, but has quickly become one of the highest rating packages available. I have been a CA Antivirus user for years (have tried other programs also but always went back to CA). That was until I tried Kaspersky. I won’t be going back now. Kaspersky is easier to use, more effective (IMHO), uses less system resources (i.e. doesn’t slow the computer down as much) and is competitively priced.

Kaspersky Lab offers an award-winning line of antivirus software, anti-spyware and Internet security solutions for your home computer or laptop. If you would like to view the awards received by Kaspersky you can visit the Kaspersky Awards page. Want to try it and discover what all the fuss is about? Download a FREE 30 day trial today!

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While allowing comments on your blog is a valuable way to keep content fresh (and keep search engines busy re-indexing your blog) the issue of comment spam is one of the most frustrating aspects of blog ownership.

If you’re a blog owner then I’m sure you’re well acquainted with comment spammers… all those annoying commenters who dump comments filled with links that have absolutely NOTHING to do with the content of your blog, viagra links, online pharmacies, pornography etc. Life as a blog owner would be much nicer without these scumbags (Oops, did I say that? Schlap my wrist! LOL)

But did you know that many of those comments have not even been left by real, physical, human visitors? That’s right, a high proportion of those comments are actually automated by insidious computer programs that range around dumping spam comments on every blog it can find. Now THAT is truly annoying!

Thankfully there are methods to help stop comment spam. One of the best wordpress plugins to help stop comment spam is ‘Botproof Captcha’. For those who don’t know a CAPTCHA is defined as a ‘Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart’. It’s one of those boxes where you have to type in the displayed characters/numbers before your information is submitted. If you’re on the individual post page right now just look below the post to the comment section to see Botproof Captcha in action.

Most CAPTCHA’s these days are completely useless as bots (computer programs) find them easy to crack. Botproof Captcha is different. Botproof captcha uses dynamic images that shift and change to make it impossible for bots using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to recognize letter and number patterns.

In the words of botproof.com;

Our captchas are made up entirely of “noise”. And it is constantly moving, so no one frame has the complete symbol displaying. Because the human mind is so much more complex than a computer, humans are able to make out the numbers and letters, even though they are moving and changing. This is impossible for any current bot program to do.

I should define the term ‘noise’ here also. Noise refers to the grids, squiggly lines, dots etc that are part of a captcha image. These parts are designed to confuse bots. Unfortunately, they no longer work.

It should be noted that while Botproof Captcha can be installed from within your wordpress dashboard you will need to go to botproof.com to sign up for a free account. It’s like adding a google analytics plugin, you need to have a google analytics account before the plugin works. To add the plugin via your wordpress dashboard simply go to ‘plugins>add new’ in the left hand navigation menu and search for botproof captcha

To provide you with an idea of how effective this plugin is, when I installed it I went from receiving 10-20 spam comments per day to 1-2. Pretty impressive huh? For this reason it is on my list of best wordpress plugins.

Check out my post about another excellent plugin that lets you ban repeated human comment spammers at Best WordPress Plugins – WP Ban. These two plugins combined will dramatically reduce the amount of comment spam your blog receives making your task as a blogger much more enjoyable.

Good luck in your efforts to stop comment spam using the best wordpress plugins around!

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Apart from finding content to update your blog, the next most frustrating aspect of blog ownership is all those spammy comments that you inevitably receive. You know the crap I’m talking about, the pharmacy sites, viagra, pornography etc. It wouldn’t be so bad if that were what your site were about. But these annoying individuals like to inundate blogs with massive long comments with 50-100 links each etc. It’s so disheartening to log in to your dashboard and discover 50, 70 or even 100 of these crappy comments that have absolutely nothing to do with your content.

This kind of behavior has made it necessary for blog owners to either turn off comments altogether or to moderate every single comment that is received (which is what I do with my blogs). Another annoying aspect of this blog spam is that perpetrators frequently leave one or more comments on every single post that is available for commenting.

To combat this type of abuse I recommend what I believe to be one of the best wordpress plugins around called ‘WP-Ban’. This plugin allows you to ban visitors according to

• IP Address
• IP Range
• Host name
• Referrer (website)
• User Agent

You can even exclude individual users from being banned despite banning every other user from their host or country.

But how do you know who to ban. Well, when you go to your comment page within your dashboard you will see that below each comment author is listed their IP address. If there are multiple spam comments coming from the same IP address you simply add that IP address to the banned IP’s in the WP-Ban settings (found under ‘Settings’>'Ban’.

If you find you have several IPs that are similar, for example 92.241.169.135 and 92.241.169.142 then you can either ban those individually or you can ban the everyone from that host by using the wildcard symbol like this 92.241.169.* or you can do it with a range like this ’92.241.169.135-92.241.169.142′

A word of caution here… do NOT ban your own IP in order to test or you will not be able to get back into your dashboard and you will have to ask your host to log in to your blog and remove the ban from your IP.

Once you have added an IP to the ban list, whenever someone using that IP tries to access your page they will be redirected to another page that you can edit from within the plugin settings. I had a little fun with mine and embedded a wav file saying ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that!’ with big red text saying ‘ALL COMMENT SPAMMERS BANNED’. You can find the wav file here

The plugin even supplies statistics of how many times a banned IP has attempted to access the blog. If you find that certain IPs don’t attempt to re-offend then you may remove the ban from that IP simply by removing it from the list. You can always re ban them if they start spamming again.

This excellent plugin is available from http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/

Another one of the best wordpress plugins that help stop comment spam is a plugin called ‘Botproof Captcha’. Botproof captcha is a unique captcha plugin that uses dynamic animated images containing a turing number (If you’re on the individual post page right now you will see this plugin in action below). This image is designed to confuse software programs that post automated comments and it works admirably. When I installed this plugin I went from receiving 10-20 spam comments daily to around 2 spam comments per day. I believe this testifies to the effectiveness of the plugin making it one of the best plugins available. This free plugin is available from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/botproof-captcha-20/

It should be noted that to use Botproof Captcha you will need to sign up for a free account at botproof.com

Good luck in your efforts to stop comment spam using the best wordpress plugins!

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Unfortunately, one of the most common issues faced by internet marketers that seriously cuts into profits is the issue of unauthorized downloads from their download pages and download directories.

Just imagine your irritation when you discover that the $97 product that you have sold 50 times has actually been downloaded 78 times (all from different IP addresses)… that constitutes a loss of $2716… Yipes, that’s one heck of a loss!

And how did it happen?

Well, there are several ways it can happen.

1. Search engines indexing your download page and people finding it
2. People finding your download directory
3. Legitimate customers bookmarking your download page with online bookmarking services

I’ll deal with these one by one.

Search engines indexing your download page

Because search engines regularly crawl your site, if you add a download page they are going to find it. But how do you stop them from indexing that page? Aha, that’s actually simple… all you need is the little meta tag below added to the head section of your download page.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

This tag causes search engines to ignore your download page and not include it in their index. If it isn’t in their index then no unscrupulous rip-off artist can find it and download your products without authorization

People finding your download directory

Some unscrupulous people will visit an ecommerce site then add a simple /download or /downloads to the end of the URL and if the owner hasn’t been a little smart then the result will be a page containing hyperlinks directly to the downloadable files

The way to stop this is to add a simple index.htm or index.html file to the directory. Browsers automatically look for these files and load them if they are present. That way, if someone goes to the directory, whatever you have put on that page will appear rather than the directory contents… mine has a blank page. It’s probably also a good idea to name the directory something completely obscure, you could give the directory some completely screwy name like ad9cy45jm or whatever that no-one would ever guess would be a download directory. A combination of these two is probably a good idea just in case someone has a way of working around the index page.

Note that the index.html page works even with a directory inside a blog… for example, visit http://automatedblogpostingsoftware.com/downloads and a page with some stupid text intended as a joke will be generated… that is my index.html page (Note: This is NOT my download directory, it’s a complete decoy LOL)

Legitimate customers bookmarking your download page with online bookmarking services

This is the third way that unauthorised people can access your product downloads. Unfortunately, this is also the hardest one to combat. People are allowed to bookmark their download page and it’s a perfectly legitimate thing to do just in case something goes wrong with the first download.

To overcome this problem you need software that issues a temporary download link that is only active for a certain period of time or a certain number of downloads. One such software program is Smartdd (short for ‘smart digital download’). Click here for more info on SmartDD now!

I hope this post has helped you understand how unauthorized downloads occur and how to protect your products from the methods used… Here is to profitable online ventures!

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