www.infysec.com
Demystifying Innovations
1. Stock & Flow: The Ideal Writing Mix for Your Online Content
Stock is your evergreen, tent pole content that draws traffic from the moment of publish to the end of time. Flow is the filler, the stuff that keeps your blog churning or your social media streams full. Check out the article for details.
2. David Ogilvy’s 10 Most Valuable Lessons on Advertising
Ogilvy is widely considered the father of modern advertising, and his 10 most valuable lessons contain advice that worked when he wrote it in the 1960s and that work for online writers today. Here’s lesson #2 of 10.
The temptation to entertain instead of selling is contagious.
3. Web Copy That Sells: 9 Can’t-Fail Formulas
Pretty much the cream of the crop for copywriting formulas. Appetizer. Main course to follow.
4. If Don Draper Tweeted: The 27 Copywriting Formulas That Will Drive Clicks and Engagement
Shameless plug alert! I wrote this article, but I didn’t really write it. All the formulas listed here are the incredible work of super smart writers and advertisers. It’s all them, none me.
5. Master This Copywriting Formula to Dominate Any Social Media Platform
Last copywriting formula link, I swear! This one’s great if you want to get deep into one, single, can’t-miss formula for writing on social media or blogs.
6. My All Time Favorite Blog Post And Why It’s So Great
Just a sampling of factors:
- Unique voice
- Easy to read
- Has personality
- Has fantastic visuals
- Useful and inspiring
If your website doesn’t read well on those devices, you’re losing a huge chunk of mobile users. It’s time to embrace responsive design. Getting started can get complicated, but here are some tips to help.
1. Go Mobile First
Before you plan your design for desktop or laptop screens, think about the user experience on a mobile device. A lot of designers are embracing the mobile first movement. Why? Because mobile is becoming more relevant than desktop.
Approximately 1 in every 7 people on earth use their mobile devices to access the internet. Focus on how users interact with your website over their mobile phones first. Then build out your design for larger screen sizes.
2. Get Acquainted with Media Queries
Media queries are a feature in CSS3 that allow content to respond to different conditions on a particular device. Media queries check for a device’s resolution, height, width and orientation. Then it uses this information to determine which CSS rules to apply. Media queries are the driving force behind responsive design.
3. Understand What Mobile Means for Your Users
People interact with websites differently over a smartphone than they do over a desktop. Use analytics to figure out why a user is visiting your website on their phone. They may want to get quick information via the search bar. If that’s common among your users, then make your search bar highly visible and always present.
4. Use Percentages
One of the hardest parts of responsive design is implementing a fluid grid. A fluid grid works together with media queries to display content on different viewports.
Instead of designing breakpoints for every possible viewport, you set a maximum layout size. From there, you define the widths and height by proportion, not pixel. This allows the site to rearrange the layout based on percentages.
5. The Need for Speed
One of the drawbacks of responsive design is slow loading times. In fact, a recent study shows that the majority (48%) of responsive sites load anywhere from 4 to 8 seconds. That length of load time was acceptable in 1997, but in 2014, 64% of smartphone users expect a site to load in under 4 seconds.
The main reason behind a slow site are non-optimized images. Don’t let those images drag your responsiveness down.
I know that you’ve heard this a lot while building your website, getting started with SEO, diving into Google Analytics and even when you started your business, but it’s true:
By this I am referring at the fact that you need to understand the SEO process, prepare the tools that will make your job 1 million times easier and setup goals for what you want to achieve.
Additionally you need to have a clean design with nice fonts that makes articles easy to read, uses a smart theme (if you are on WordPress) with good coding that Google loves.
a. Understand the process
Again, this is not a hard process but you need to know why you are doing this, how search engines work and how you can achieve good SEO rankings in search engines.
But, by the time you will finish reading this article you will have these clear.
b. Use smart tools to make your job easier
There are tons of tools out there and there are a lot really good tools, but you need to use the best tools to make your job easier so you can focus on what’s really important.
That is why I will list here the tools that I use and consider the most important for your SEO efforts:
c. Setup Goals
Always, always setup goals when starting a new project. In this case you can have as a goal a specific ranking for your keywords, a targeted number of links to your site or visitors that come to your site from search engines.
Personally, I set as a goal for my articles torank fastand then get on the first page of Google.
Sometimes they do get there and sometimes they don’t, depending on how competitive the keyword is.
If they are on the first page I already have a boost in traffic and all I have to do to get them higher on the page is just increase my site authority.
Ensure all you do is full of perfection, best tools to test are listed below
Grabber
Grabber is a nice web application scanner which can detect many security vulnerabilities in web applications. It performs scans and tells where the vulnerability exists. It can detect the following vulnerabilities:
- Cross site scripting
- SQL injection
- Ajax testing
- File inclusion
- JS source code analyzer
- Backup file check
It is not fast as compared to other security scanners, but it is simple and portable. This should be used only to test small web applications because it takes too much time to scan large applications.
This tool does not offer any GUI interface. It also cannot create any PDF report. This tool was designed to be simple and for personal use. You can try this tool just for personal use. If you are thinking of it for professional use, I will never recommend it.
This tool was developed in Python. And an executable version is also available if you want. Source code is available, so you can modify it according your needs. The main script is grabber.py, which once executed calls other modules like sql.py, xss.py or others.
Vega
Vega is another free open source web vulnerability scanner and testing platform. With this tool, you can perform security testing of a web application. This tool is written in Java and offers a GUI based environment. It is available for OS X, Linux and Windows.
It can be used to find SQL injection, header injection, directory listing, shell injection, cross site scripting, file inclusion and other web application vulnerabilities. This tool can also be extended using a powerful API written in JavaScript.
While working with the tool, it lets you set a few preferences like total number of path descendants, number of child paths of a node, depth and maximum number of request per second. You can use Vega Scanner, Vega Proxy, Proxy Scanner and also Scanner with credentials. If you need help, you can find resources in the documentation section:
When it comes to security testing there are certain questions that stick to each mind related to each and every type. So with this article our team has tried to formulate the best possible answers.
- PHYSICAL SECURITY
Questions:
- Where are my documents stored?
- Who is watching out for them?
If someone can access your information – and your customer’s information – that’s not a good thing. Some might even call it game over.
Tips:
Choose a vendor with a center that’s staffed by security personnel and covered by surveillance cameras. Multifactor identification that limits pre-authorized visitors is a huge help as well.
You should also verify that the data center physically separates hardware from any other hosting it provides. Another best practice is hardware that’s physically secured using separate cages and locking cabinets.
2. NETWORK SECURITY
Questions:
- What type of network infrastructure is your host using?
- What is the network intrusion monitoring policy?
Tips:
Verify that your cloud provider monitors network infrastructure components and services such as routing, switching and bandwidth 24/7. Certified engineers also need to be available to resolve any issues according to your chosen service class. Automated network intrusion monitoring procedures should also operate 24/7.
3. TRANSPORT SECURITY
Question:
- Are all communications between clients and the cloud encrypted?
Tip:
Look for a cloud provider that encrypts communications using up to AES-256 bit SSL v3 or TLS 1.0 and SSH. This ensures that all content and operations are secure from any possible interference or interception en route.
4. APPLICATION SECURITY
Questions:
- Does the application even consider security?
- What is the penetration testing?
Tips:
Users should automatically receive access to new versions or upgrades as soon as they are available. However, cloud providers should never perform an upgrade without customer knowledge. You should be able to request test environments to perform appropriate testing on new versions, or any other aspect of the solution.
Even when almost everybody agrees to the part that Network Security is a vital organ of the IT infrastructure system. Yet, there are newer worries that underline just how critical it is to take network security seriously. With the changing face of the internet — from desktops to handheld devices and from data centers to cloud computing and IoT — network security too, has changed colors. All this has resulted in sudden surge in respondent networks & internet activities. And hence cyber threats has also been seen rising. More and more devices, networks and people are vulnerable to cyber threats like phishing, attacks and malwares.
According to the 2015 Trustwave Global Security Report, 98% of applications tested were vulnerable to attacks, whereas 95% of mobile applications have at least one known vulnerability. Nearly 43% breach investigations were reported by the retail sector, with a 42% in the e-commerce sector, because both these sectors were characterized by high volumes of payment activities.
Limitations & challenges
As the statistical analysis suggests, conventional mechanisms to deal with Network Security are not sufficiently enough. Perimeter-centric defense mechanisms are primarily designed to protect the network, and not the data that flows. With Cloud Computing & IoT, the definition of a perimeter is becoming hard to concretize. In the new age context, the perimeter-centric strategies are inadequate for sophisticated attacks, with no mechanisms for data-in-motion security.
With the kind of Data & High-speed networks and ever increasing bandwidth, conventional mechanisms are finding it difficult to scale-up. Effective changes in network usage patterns have added another level of challenges. Retail, e-commerce like online industries are in booming phase and vast majority of people are using their mobile devices to purchase online. All these have been changing dimensions of Networks and simultaneously of Network Security of course. Cloud Computing & IoT adds up to network traffic at a very large scale.
Even though there is need for analyzing everything that goes out and comes in your network, user experience can’t be compromised. Variety of things happening on internet puts enough challenges in front of manual or defined set of rules. Need of the hour is Behavioral Analysis, Predictive Analysis – machines talking and learning, staying ahead in time, learning from mistakes and building intelligence to defend network & data from possible external attacks.
So keep your web application as secure as you can.
Make your steps better to ensure that the security testing process happens the best.
Method and Reporting
Analyze the testing requirement & understand the Web application that you are testing in depth. Conform that everyone on your testing team knows his or her role to define the testing process.
Second Step: Set-up the Test Environment
Set-up a test environment that is different from development and production environment. It contains different web server, database server, and application server if appropriate
Third Step: Functional testing
Functional Testing is the type of testing done against the business requirements of application. It is a black box type of testing. This is mandatory step in the software testing.
Fourth Step: Interface testing
Interface testing is one of the most important software tests in assuring the quality of software products. Interface is actually software that consists of sets of messages, commands, images, and other features that allow communication between a device and a user.
Fifth Step: Usability testing
Usability testing is important for an application that is used to make manual tasks easier. The application should comply with convenience standards. In case of usability testing, Web site should be simple to use.
Try to follow certain things in case of doing usability testing:
- Correct navigation should be there between web pages.
- Site map should be there.
- Avoid over-crowded content.
- Practice user friendliness to all types of users, from novice to expert.
- Condition hold for physically challenged people.
- Alpha testing: A testing process done by developers in a development environment.
- Beta testing: A testing process done by end-users in deployment or client environment.
When I end up hearing that the government has been busy taking up new steps in making up their regulations for the cyber security patterns, the same hits me with a question, that with this type of changing trends, its really tough to understand, where and how will things turn up in coming days, so after reading many things I could settle up for these set of things that may end up in near future when it comes to cyber security:
1. Increase in cyber threats when it comes to IoT devices: I am sure that a lot of IoT devices can be expected to be launched in the coming future but the need of good cyber security patterns should increase as this shall also increase the risk of these devoces.
2. What about online extortion. Ransomware has always been a and will remain a major and rapidly growing threat. It is an estimated theory that the attacks will get more personal and the intense need of cyber security shall grow by each passing day, as cyber extortionists will devise new ways to target victims.
3. Arising Hacktivism: It had been clearly driven that too with an effect by a clearly defined political or social point in suach a manner to make, hacktivist group and the same shall get more active and the usage assigned for the platform is efficient enough to make its point.
Thus with an increase in the threats the need of security testing seems to have really grown up.
Now when different governments around the world are actually busy launching theory norms regarding the cyber security, one needs a deep understanding on all the pros and cons it has. Though this up booting world has given things a bad phase but governments have well taken care of the cyber security patterns to ensure that the kicks of terrorist doesn’t invade the inner peace of the country. It was well reported that the US and UK government worked hand in hand with the ethical hackers of Del to secure the theft of highly essential information. Further the context to this conversation was drawn from the works taken up by Dell Secure works, in specific way its more about working on disrupting Dridex, that can be in actuality explained up as a monstrous botnet that packet sniffed thousands of users’ usernames and passwords from bank websites, so to ensure that the whole part goes a big shot hit, they teamed up with good hackers and got the fire settled, Andrey Ghinkul. But it seems that the decision may be even helpful in their security testing platforms.
When I actually happen to point out the hacking understandings of US govt. it’s a bit strange to understand the whole psychology of US govt. officials regarding this. That’s one big reason that the officials have stream lined its approach to hacking in a very conservative-- often punishing manner, instead of rewarding it.
Customers today are well-informed, and have high expectations. As your business expands, whether by offering new products and services or entering new markets, your customer relationship management (CRM) tools must evolve too. In fact, you might already have outgrown your existing solutions without realizing it., also make sure that presence of your brand management techniques are well felt.
Here are nine warning signs that your system no longer works, plus tips on how to address the issues.
1. You’re losing customers when salespeople leave. Your agents are an important part of your sales process, but you need to know as much as they do about each of your customers. Make sure your system is set up to create customer profiles, so you start retaining customer information the moment a prospect begins to send buying signals.
2. Customer information is out of date. Having customer profiles is good. Making sure yours contain current, comprehensive information and can be accessed by teams from sales, marketing, and service is even better. This way, when customer tastes or needs change, you can adapt your relationship accordingly.
3. Lack of follow up turns leads cold. Even with the best marketing and sales teams, some leads fall through the cracks. Track interactions with prospects and customers, and help your team personalize communications to keep more leads interested and engaged.
4. Lack of customer and marketing insights. It isn’t enough to know how close customers are to making a purchase. You also need to know their needs, budget, and tastes. When customers share this sort of actionable information, your staff should be able to use each new insight, strengthening customer relationships across marketing, sales, and service.