We were doing cyber security on a server that had been hacked. We were improving the security, but that was hard to do because it was the nastiest defaced server we’ve ever encountered. Everywhere you went the customers of the company and the administrators saw dead bodies of children strewn across the ground with blood coming out of their body. They were lying in heaps upon heaps of dead bodies everywhere you went on the site. The server had been hacked by a foreign country or someone sympathetic to a foreign country alleging that the United States was killing their people. We did not take the time to try and independently  verify the claims, because we had to get that server back in proper condition as quickly as possible.

Customers were horrified and wanted the images removed, so we did, but we did so much more then that. We used our experience  to ensure it wouldn’t happen again.  We made the server far more secure and made many security recommendations. however some were ignored by the customer. The company quickly learned that ignoring security recommendations from cyber security experts is a big mistake and they learned it the hard way. They were hacked again to the horror and outrage of their customers. After we cleaned up yet another hack on their server, they took cyber security very seriously and finally putting all of our security fixes into place,  even though it made a few customers grumble because it was an inconvenience.

Did they lose customers due to those hacks? Yes, they did, but due to our quick response to the disaster they retained enough to barely stay in business and are doing far better today.

What  should you learn from this experience about a defaced server? That server security is very important or you too may end up a victim of cyber crime. We hope you won’t have images of dead bodies everywhere, but you will lose customers and stop working on other things you might be doing to respond to the hack, thus a loss of even more money.

If you run a server, retaining our services to secure your servers as much as we can or as much as we can within the time constraints you put us on.  We offer one affordable security audit that looks for gaping holes and is much more affordable and another that is an extremely comprehensive security audit fixing everything we can find.

Our affordable server security audit goes through gaping holes in your server and will make a patch for them. We will make your server as secure as we possibly can during our affordable server security audit.

What does an affordable server security audit entail?

• Fixing default insecure server configurations
• Fixing security holes that we only offer to our customers
• Making the server as secure as you will let us in the time constraint we have
• Doing a quick check to see if the server has already been hacked

How much is a server security audit? Only $3000 and if you don’t think it’s worth it, read about a server company who hired us due to dead bodies across their entire site.

Buy your server security audit now!

Cyber crime is a word many know, but aren’t sure how to stay safe from it or what it entirely means. The definition of cyber crime is “criminal activities carried out by means of computers or the Internet.”. Most people are  aware that you can carry crimes out from your computer, but don’t know how to stay safe from them. You don’t want to be a victim of cyber-crime, because 60 percent of companies who are go out of business. While it is impossible to stay secure from every single threat there are ways to reduce the impact of being a victim of cyber-crime that are outlined below.

Can I avoid being a victim to cyber crime?

None  of our clients have been victims to  cyber criminals since they hired us to secure their sites, help secure their employees being tricked by deceptive tricks whether in email, phone or in-person.

To protect yourself from cyber-crime don’t put random things you find into your computer, for example if you find a flash drive, also known as a usb drive on the ground don’t put it into any device.  Criminals put these in areas where they hope a victim will pick up and connect it to their machine, thus hacking their system.  It isn’t just flash drives and usb drives cyber-criminals use, it’s anything you can connect to a computer whether it’s a dvd, cd, etc.

Another part of protecting yourself from cyber-criminals is facing reality and accepting the fact that your website isn’t secure. Once you do that, you can hire a cyber security company like ours, whose founder has over 20 years of experience in security and gets the best cyber-security experts to help make your site far more secure.  You can reduce the impact a hack would have on your company by reducing what information you store online, making backups constantly and using email protection against common fraudulent emails, also known as phishing emails.

Want more tips on how to stay safe from cyber crime? Then sign up for our email updates below where you will get information only sent out to subscribers, along with our latest articles that have been written.

Wannacry ransomware is a new piece of ransomware that’s made a lot of news, however the likelyhood of you needing to worry isn’t that high.

How does wannacry ransomware work?

If you are using Windows 10, you have nothing to worry about. Anyone using Windows 10 is secure from wannacry ransomware. Anyone using a version of Windows below Windows 10 needs to go to Windows Updates and do an update immediately.

Wasn’t the Wannacry Ransomware stopped by a researcher?

The first version was, however there are several new versions of the wannacry ransomware that made it so they aren’t affected by the way they stopped that ransomware.

I use Windows XP, how do I protect myself from all versions of wannacry?

Microsoft was very kind and sent out an emergency update for Windows XP users to install from the Windows update tool. Windows XP usually doesn’t get updates anymore, unless there is an emergency where Microsoft makes an exception and gets you a patch. If you are on Windows XP, you should update to a newer operating system if at all possible. Windows XP is 13 years old and rarely ever gets support from Microsoft, since they no longer support it except under emergency situations.

Did we not answer your question? Leave a comment and we will do our best to get it answered properly!

SEO is very important, unfortunately one of the main problems we run into with our customers is that some giant companies are still selling SEO backlinks services, where they go around the web posting links to your website and call it SEO.

This is not helpful, it is in fact quite damaging, fortunately the SEO damage can be reversed but it takes time to fix the SEO damage and put proper search engine optimization in its place.

What is SEO backlink damage?

SEO backlink damage as we described above is where you go around the web randomly posting links back to your site, known as backlinks. The reason this is damaging is because the backlinks are irrelevant to your site and the search engines know that you or someone else is trying to damage your sites reputation.  If you make a bunch of profiles and post backlinks to your site that have no relevancy with your company, that can be damaging, especially when the sites you post on are primarily used for spam.

Organic SEO backlinks are entirely different then what we are talking about in this post and will discuss that in a future post. Organic SEO backlinks are good and healthy, but that’s all we will say on that subject.

How do I fix SEO backlink damage?

It varies from site to site, however one big step is finding the most offending websites that hurt your rankings and then remove  those websites by using the disavow tool in Google. We try to keep the amount of SEO backlinks we remove low, since we only focus on the worst damage.

If you simply remove the backlinks, that in itself does not fix your sites SEO damage. We always have to update the site to rank better in many other ways and do so for $99.99 a month. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.