By Satish |

Friday, March 19, 2010

• Speedy Fox To Optimize, Speed up Firefox Profiles For Faster Firefox Browsing
• Word Press iFrame Hacking. Dealing With Malicious Code Injected on Wordpress Blogs
• Best Free Remote Backup Softwares For Windows

Speedy Fox To Optimize, Speed up Firefox Profiles For Faster Firefox Browsing Firefox browser is lucrative in many ways – The exhaustive collection of addons and the easy to use functionality makes it the best web browser, and it has glued to that spot from quite a long time. As the amount of addons, bookmarks and url history adds up, firefox browser gets heavy and consumes a lot of memory resources that none of the other browsers could do. Firefox stays ahead, once again! (Being sarcastic) Thanks to Crystal Idea who has developed an simple application especially for firefox browser that optimizes the firefox profile. As you might know, your bookmarks, the history and all the information are stored in your default firefox profile. So, optimizing profile can greatly speed up your browsing activities. The app Speedy Fox can be directly downloaded from here. It's portable and optimizes the database of files that are in your profile in a couple of minutes. Just make sure that you've closed your firefox browser before running speedy fox. You have to click the button "Speed up my Firefox" and choose your profile. I used this app. on my firefox browser and I must say I am pleased with the performance and speed it has achieved after optimizing. So, go ahead and give this an try!

Word Press iFrame Hacking. Dealing With Malicious Code Injected on Wordpress Blogs WordPress, as an blogging application is prone to be hacked apart from being an easy to use blog software. Several thousands of wordpress blogs are hacked everyday – Blame the plugins, old wp version and some unsealed loopholes. Yet again, this blog was hacked, let's say an malicious code was injected onto this website and let me tell you, we don't host any Trojan, virus on this blog which you might have witnessed in these couple of days if you were using an good antivirus program. Right now, it is completely clean and it will be the same in the future. So, this website was in the hacked state for more than a week. An rogue code was forcibly injected onto the website in the footer field, which I believe was up here for more than 10 days, letting every visitor know that this is an harmful website which of course is completely untrue. Indication of a blog being hacked If you've been following this blog then you would know I am quite an lazy person when it comes to updating the blog. However, while checking out the blog statistics, I saw an 25% decrease in the revenue (usually they are quite consistent) and to make it worse, the traffic went down with the same percentage making it an terrible start for the month of march. Only if I was active enough in blogging, this would not have happened. In anyway, I want to share my experience which I believe might be helpful for other's so that they can get an idea on how to deal with malicious code and remove such iframes javascript from the blog. Before that, here are some of the indication (with regard to this blog) that were seen when it was hacked.. Decline in overall traffic, thanks to Google analytics. Firefox browser was shutting down whenever I visited my website. In the status bar of the browser, unknown components were loading along with the site elements. (the harmful code coming from roguenet.info which is hacked as well) Website went slow despite having an reliable server and compressed css. Finding the malicious code The instant way is to check out avoid malicious code is to see source code of your homepage. You can click on view –> page source in firefox to view the source of the page. I found out 4 lines of unknown code embedded between <iframe>.. </iframe>. And I quickly knew that I never iframe any code, so the obvious – site under attack was sensed. To confirm it's existence, I used firebug addon that cleared the minimal doubt I had. Check out the screenshot to get an idea.. Dealing with the malicious code on Wordpress I panicked for a moment, but that had to happen. Now the real deal was to take this line of code out from the website. I did face an similar situation few months ago and tried the same actual method. Do read that post and come back.. Okay, so now I downloaded all the theme files and used Notepad++, it has an exclusive option to search for text in whole files/dir which is very handy and made my search easier than ever. I was very close to find out the line of code, however, I couldn't. Luckily, at the right time the guys hosting this blog (knownhost) came up with the information of the file that is infected which was not a wordpress theme file. In actual, the malicious code was in the plugin, the contact form plugin for wordpress which was unexpected! In no time, I downloaded the plugin .php file and removed the malicious code. So, that's it! It took me around 2 hours to figure all this out, do remember to contact your hosting support, use firebug or check out the source code, download all the files and use notepad++ to bulk search the text.

Best Free Remote Backup Softwares For Windows A remote backup service is one which backs up or saves important files and folders on a remote server via some kind of client software which is typically provided by the backup providing company. The client program collects, encrypts and transmits data on a regular basis to the backup service company's server. A few such best backup service providers which features free backup options on windows machine are discussed below. CUCKU.COM This is one of the best backup service providers available in the market. It provides a dual option of both local as well as remote backup. When you decide to backup your files, bookmarks, emails etc, the software prompts for a choice of backup place. Local option would save it on the hard-disk or on an external hard-drive. If you select remote backup then first the files and other necessary information are encrypted and saved on the computer's hard-drive as a local backup. Then a copy is sent to your backup partner for storage. Since the files are encrypted, they are not accessible by your backup partner. Moreover a real-time check ensures that any change in data on your computer is immediately relayed onto your remote backup. If you accidentally delete any file then it can be immediately restored via the local backup. In case of a bigger problem like fire or theft, you have to download the entire file base from your remote backup partner. Fast broadband connection and high bandwidth would be quite helpful in this case. IDRIVE.COM This software combines the work of a client software as well as that of a remote backup partner. The free option offers a maximum of 2 GB of backup space and hence can be used for backing up the most important of files. It incorporates features like automatic selection and continuous data protection (CDP). CDP provides a constant update of any change in data (every 10 minutes) and accordingly changes the data on the host site. Needless to say the data is protected and also archived for easy access. The site has a virtual hard-drive interface and the entire data can be accessed from any location. MOZY.COM Here we have another backup service provider which offers comprehensive storage and ease of use. There are two plans offered by this site, free and paid. The free option offers 2 GB of space which can be used for backing up essential documents, pictures, music files and other smaller files. If you require a larger backup space then you have to opt for the unlimited but paid option. Files are stored with a decent level of encryption and the site also allows backup of both open and protected files like the Outlook PST files. Other features include automated or schedules backup timings and bandwidth selection which provides the user with options to limit his/her bandwidth for other important services.