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We’re taking steps to block SEMalt and referrer spam from our hosting and analytics platforms

Chris O'Brien December 18, 2014 0 Comments

Over the past few months we've been seeing an ever increasing amount of "automated" and botnet generated referrer spam coming into websites hosted on our hosting platform and onto sites that we manage on other hosting services on behalf of our customers. This is a global problem affecting websites regardless of the type of site as the "visits" are all automated and generated randomly - so if...

Securing your website with an SSL certificate

Chris O'Brien November 02, 2014 0 Comments

Google has been saying for a while now that having an SSL Certificate for your website will help it rank better within organic search results. While it won’t give you a huge advantage over your non-secure competitors there is always the possibility that, in the future, Google will give secured website a larger boost on search results pages as more sites adopt HTTPS. Google has become a...

POODLE Vulnerability – We’ve disabled SSLv3 support on our web hosting servers

Chris O'Brien October 17, 2014 0 Comments

On October 14th 2014 Google released details on the POODLE attack, a padding oracle attack that targets CBC-mode ciphers in the 15 year old SSLv3 security protocol. The vulnerability allows an active "man-in-the-middle" attacker to decrypt content exchanged via an SSLv3 connection. While secure connections primarily use TLS (the successor to SSL), most users were vulnerable because web...

Upgrade your Drupal and WordPress sites now!

Chris O'Brien August 12, 2014 0 Comments

Just as every now and then you need to update and upgrade the software on your computer, your website also needs upgrades to the software that powers it to keep your website operating at its best. On the 6th August a patch for a security vulnerability that had been discovered in all recent versions of popular blogging and content management platforms Drupal and WordPress was released. These...

Don’t be misled if you get an email from IGN Domains

Chris O'Brien July 18, 2014 0 Comments

Over the past couple of weeks we've received calls and emails from a few customers about an email they have received from a "company" called IGN Domains asking them to confirm they are the registered owner of their domain name and informing them that, in all cases, someone is trying to register the same name on "7 domain extensions". The email also invited the customer to get in touch with IGN...

Our favourite spam bot prevention modules for Drupal 7

Chris O'Brien July 08, 2014 0 Comments

Drupal has a number of modules designed to help websites combat comment and contact form spam generated by automated systems known as "bots", in this article we're going to focus on using a few of the best modules available to combat this ever growing annoyance. CAPTCHA It's best to think of the CAPTCHA module for Drupal as a framework or pathway to adding in different types of CAPTCHA checks -...

Block referrer spam from hosting platforms

Chris Grant (he/him) February 24, 2014 0 Comments

Information security