Macy’s Was Hacked — What You Need To Know

Posted on November 20, 2019November 20, 2019Categories UncategorizedTags , , , ,

Two important pages of Macy’s website was hacked for one week in October. During that period your credit card details and other information may have been stolen. You were only impacted if you went to the checkout page or your wallet page. Any information entered, including credit cards was sent to the criminals between October 7th, 2019 and October 15th, 2019 when they detected and removed it.

How was Macys hacked? The information given makes it sound like persistent XSS, which means code in a computer language called Javascript was entered into an area that accepts information and was saved and stored with all the other information. It then contacted the hackers and sent any to the hackers system with the information, until it was removed.

This type of hack truly is trivial for most hackers to do, but we’re glad Macy’s detected it and removed it in a week.

Why Linking To Your Sources Helps Your Source — Link Juice

Posted on November 12, 2019November 12, 2019Categories Uncategorized
A picture of juice representing link juice from wikimedia commons under Creative Commons license,

Have you ever written an article and had sources, but didn’t link to them? If you’ve done that, you’ve taken link juice away from your source. Link juice is when one site links to another site. Some search engines find linking to other sites as giving them a vote of confidence and raising their authority if your site has good authority in the eyes of search engines, which includes Google.

do not make a bunch of fake sites or pay for your links to be everywhere as bad link juice can hurt a site, just like good link juice from a well known source, can help boost your sites trust or authority with Google.

Why are links so important? Links is one way of saying, we like this person and lending some of your authority to that person. There are multiple types of link juice, which are all uniquely different but have the same underlying vote of confidence to the search engines.

What if I link telling search engines not to follow that link with no-follow?

No-follow is used for the purpose of linking to a source, but then saying to the search engine “hey, don’t follow that link”, which means under normal circumstances you keep your link juice and the search engine does not transfer anything to them, positively or negatively.

we hope this post on links and authority has helped you. We will be posting again soon.

Delete WP-Doctor — It Contains Malware

Posted on November 11, 2019November 11, 2019Categories Uncategorized

We discovered that WP-Doctor, a plugin in the WordPress repository contained malicious code. After confirming the plugin had malicious code in it, we contacted WordPress Security and they took it down.

It is important to mention that they noted they couldn’t find anywhere in the code where the malicious code was activated, so they don’t believe it was hurting the sites, but took it down until it was repaired.

We had great hope that the company would fix the issue, and everyone would be happy. Sadly, it was suspended in September, 2018 and has had no updates as of November 10th, 2019.

We suggest that you delete the plugin WP-Doctor since it still isn’t patched.

Outdated Plugins Spread Malware Ads Due To Hackers

Posted on November 9, 2019November 9, 2019Categories Uncategorized

If a site doesn’t update a plugin does that cause harm? A lot of times plugins don’t disclose security updates, but hackers still know if they were insecure. Some plugins are currently being hacked with malware advertisements, also known as malvertizing. Updating your plugins can avoid this.

If the website has to follow California’s CCPA, there could be a fee of $750 per user, even if the users weren’t damaged by the intrusion.

Thankfully, we had a positive conversation about the CCPA with one of the people who has helped write the laws. After our talk, 7 new changes that we had discussed in detail were changed to help businesses and became law.

If you don’t have to follow the CCPA, Google safebrowsing still remembers for 3 months which sites have been hacked. This makes it very hard to get seen online. Even after the 3 months are up, it can be hard to get the website visibility back, as Google remembers when your site was last hacked.

Thankfully, you can protect your sites for free from this particular issue by updating your plugins.

What Is SEO And Why Do I Need It On My Website?

Posted on November 7, 2019November 7, 2019Categories UncategorizedTags , ,

You may have wondered what SEO is and why you need it on your website. SEO stands for search engine optimization and you need it on your website so you will be found online.

We are uniquely qualified to provide SEO services, since our founder co-founded a unique original search provider called CheetaSearch when Yahoo and Google were still fighting for dominance in 2000.

Our founder competed with giant search giants after school and on the weekends, so we have plenty of experience with websites, web search, and ultimately how the web works and what you need to do to survive and thrive.

If you need search engine optimization, then you are at the right place. We understand what you’re going through. You have something great, something amazing that you want the world to know about. We can help you with that. It isn’t instantaneous, but we will work side by side remotely with you, because we care about you succeeding.