While all the pieces and tools in our Hosting NerdCare package work together and are equally vital to your piece of mind, our hack detection system does stand out in the industry for its uniqueness. At the time of this blog, we are not aware of another company offering a product even close to ours, and the benefit to you over your competition is really quite amazing.

Clients protected by our Hosting NerdCare Assurance will have their website scanned every hour of every day. In a nutshell, our system will take cryptographic signatures of every single file in your website, and compare them on an hourly basis. If a hacker manages to change even one bit in one of your files, our team will be immediately notified of the change, and we can swing into action. The vast majority of business owners only find out that their site was compromised once Google or Badaware.org block their site, and once that happens, it can literally take weeks to reverse the damage and have the site back up and running.

Nerds On Site’s Assurance packages allows for our team to know the moment a breach is made, and equally as important, we are notified as to which exact file was compromised. This level of detail allows us to repair the damage before anyone knows about it, ensuring that your site isn’t blacklisted.

This level of support translates really resulting a protection of your image and brand, as well assuring the quickest possible response times and smallest amount of downtime. At the end of the day, Hosting NerdCare Assurance will have a direct effect on your bottom line, by ensuring that your website is up all the time!

Yesterday, in our continuing series on NerdCare Assurance, we wrote about the depth and breadth of our backup procedures for our NerdCare clients. Today we want to talk for moment about why we want those backups.

Every day, over 3500 business websites are hacked. With the sheer number of servers world-wide hosting websites, inevitably one is crashing at any given moment. While Nerds On Site takes every precaution to protect against every conceivable threat and risk for our hosting clients, it is still best to plan for the worst.

As part of our Assurance packages, Nerds On Site will restore any damage to your site by utilizing our backup system. Since data restores on our system are generally measured in seconds, it’s usually the quickest way to recover from a disaster, no matter how large or small.

Consider the following scenario – one of your employees is logged into your website, making some minor changes. Suddenly, and quite by accident, this employee deletes a file, or perhaps a folder. Now your website is possibly inactive, or missing crucial information your clients need. With another provider you would then have to go through the old procedure of calling them up, waiting on hold, and hoping that they have a backup of the data. Inevitably, if you find that they do have a backup, it will cost you money to restore the data, and perhaps take upwards of 24 hours while they look through their tapes for the information. At Nerds On Site, a quick phone call to your dedicated Nerd, or a quick email to our dedicated team, and the damage is restored free of charge.

This level of support translates really resulting a protection of your image and brand, as well assuring the quickest possible response times and smallest amount of downtime. At the end of the day, Hosting NerdCare Assurance will have a direct effect on your bottom line, by ensuring that your website is up all the time!

We would like to give our clients advance notice that we will be taking down our mail systems for approximately 2-4 hours starting at 00:00am EST on April 3, 2010. During that time, your mail will be queued, but not delivered. During the upgrade, our team will send regular updates via Twitter, at twitter.com/nerdshosting.

Today, in our continuing series on our NerdCare Assurance packages, I would like to talk about backing up a website. Most businesses would be amazed to learn that their hosting provider does not backup their website, as there seems to be a prevailing belief that all hosting providers backup everything. Your hosting provider may even explicitly claim that they backup your website, but have you inquired as to what exactly they are backing up?

As part of all our Hosting NerdCare Assurance packages, Nerds On Site will backup everything related to your website, including all databases, email and web files. However, we go much further than this, and actually take a bare-metal backup of the server that you are hosted on. When a server goes down, due to hardware failure, hacking or any other reason, it can take days to rebuild and re-configure them. This is downtime that is extremely costly to your business. Our bare-metal backups allow us to simply replace and restore the server, while skipping all the other time-consuming steps others have to perform.

This level of support translates really resulting a protection of your image and brand, as well assuring the quickest possible response times and smallest amount of downtime. At the end of the day, Hosting NerdCare Assurance will have a direct effect on your bottom line, by ensuring that your website is up all the time!

In the world of business, it pays to know about trouble before anyone else. Hosting NerdCare Assurance is all about providing peace of mind as a goal to driving up your Productivity, Profitability and Pleasureability. The first step in the process is to provide 24×7 monitoring of your website and the server it sits on. Before we can react to an issue, we need to know about it before anyone else, and our distributed monitoring system does just this.

With monitoring nodes in 9 different geographical locations, and with monitoring provided by a third-party company, you can rest assured that even a wide-spread issue will not affect our ability to watch your website. Every 60 seconds your website and email will be checked to ensure they are working correctly.

At the first sign of trouble, our dedicated team of professionals will spring into action. With team members in 2 different countries and 3 different time zones, we offer quick responses to any detected issues. The power of our NerdCare Assurance packages lies in the fact that our team responds before you notice an issues, and before you call us for support.

Consider the stress you would normally encounter with another hosting provider – once you or a client notices that your website is down, you would then have to find time in your busy schedule to call your provider, wait on hold for an intermittent period, then explain to a first-level technician what the issue is. With Nerds On Site Hosting NerdCare Assurance, you know that your site is being monitored 24×7 by a dedicated team of professionals that will spring into action at the first sign of any trouble, almost certainly before you or any of your clients notice an issue.

This level of support translates really resulting a protection of your image and brand, as well assuring the quickest possible response times and smallest amount of downtime. At the end of the day, Hosting NerdCare Assurance will have a direct effect on your bottom line, by ensuring that your website is up all the time!

Modern business has long been moving to a ‘Just in Time’ model, which represents great efficiencies, reduces overhead and improves reaction times. Manufacturing companies have especially shown great success by switching to this model, and many other businesses look for ways that they too can take advantage of this strategy.

The opposing model is ‘Just In Case’. For example, you may keep extra inventory on hand to prepare for an unexpected demand for the item, or you may purchase special types of insurance to help your business through an unexpected situation, such as a fire or flood.

In the hosting industry, the ‘Just in Time’ model seems to the prevalent strategy, perhaps the only one that is offered. Providers will offer you 24×7 support if something goes wrong, and that is certainly not a good thing. But is it enough to just wait for something to go wrong?

Imagine this situation – your website is hacked. Since over 3500 websites are hacked daily, this is a very real possibility over the next year for your business. Do you have insurance to handle this situation? Does your hosting provider offer anything to mitigate this possibility? 24×7 support really only jumps into action after you’ve noticed that you have a problem, and then you still have to contact the hosting company to try and have them help you.

Nerds On Site offers NerdCare Assurance as part of a ‘Just in Case’ model. Our team of experts will proactively patch and update your website to reduce your vulnerability to hacking activity as much as possible. Then we’ll follow that up with frequent backups of your entire site. Then, to give you real piece of mind, we’ll scan your entire website every single hour of every single to day to ensure you haven’t been hacked, and jump into action the moment something disastrous happens.

You buy fire insurance, why not NerdCare Assurance for your critical business website? A ‘Just in Time’ attitude will not help your business in the event of a hack, as every moment your website is down translates into lost revenue and a severely damaged public image. A ‘Just in Case’ attitude will mean that a team is prepared and waiting for the moment something goes wrong, as opposed to having to examine and repair after the event.

Learn more by contacting one of our team at 1-877-MY-NERD.

Nerds On Site has been offering custom software development for more than a decade. We can tackle all sorts of projects, from your basic website, to a custom built and designed website to a full solution for your proprietary processes. We’ve delivered solutions for a wide range of clients (testimonials coming soon) from local companies all the way up to solutions to manage $100 million construction projects (yes, million ).

We have many happy clients. If you have a website or project that needs to be done, send us an EMAIL and let us help you out.

This USB battery charger from Eveready has been sold in the US and Europe since 2007. The software that comes with it includes a trojan that stays active, listening for commands on port 7777, even when the device is not connected. I aways found that cute bunny with the sunglasses to be a little suspicious.

We trust Mr. Google to find us what we are looking for, but even the venerable Mr. Google gets attacked by the bad guys. It is called search engine poisoning, and it can trap the unwary. Think before you click, and don’t always assume Mr. Google is right.

Anyone can digitally sign a file. The question is whether the digital signature traces back to a trusted Certificate Authority. Virus writers are becoming more sophisticated all the time, and some are now digitally signing their poison, making it look more official to those who are not careful about examining the signature. Fake signatures are easy to spot – IF you take the time to look. Your browser / OS will usually warn you as well, IF you pay attention. Education and awareness are still the best defense. More information can be found here.

Patching is a real pain – that is no secret to any of you. I have recommended Secunia PSI on numerous occasions for keeping third-party applications up to date. Secunia is working on an update that will make these updates automatic. Easy is good.

Endpoint Security – clients need to gain control over all those portable devices (USB drives, smart phones, MP3 players, etc.) that come and go from the work place. Along with them, malware can come and sensitive data can go. Here is an article that offers more information. The GOOD NEWS is that Nerds On Site will soon be able to offer endpoint protection as part of NerdCare.

This last one is not security-related, but it is worth noting. Microsoft is pulling the plug on the Windows Essentials Business Server product.

Dennis H in West Virginia, US

March 8, 2010

Welcome to the first of many entries from the Nerds On Site Development team. Here, you can expect updates every week covering a wide range of development issues and news within the Nerds On Site development team.

Follow us as well at:

Twitter: http://twitter.com/nerdsdev
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/nerdsdevelopment

DON’T press the F1 key – there is a current vulnerability in Windows XP / IE that has not been patched. If an attacker can convince the user to press the F1 (the default help key in Windows…well, you know the rest of the story. There is no definite word about when there will be a patch available.

On a positive note, Microsoft has been taking the battle against botnets to the courts. Let’s hope that others follow suit. This certainly will not cure the problem, but it sure helps.

Thick clients, thin clients, and now…zero clients.. This device has no OS, no memory, no drivers. I simply connects a keyboard, mouse and display to a remote server via standard TCP/IP protocols. Now this is centralized management – and centralized security.

Have a Lenovo Thinkpad? Don’t forget the supervisor password – Lenovo says the only fix is to replace the motherboard.. Ouch!

Which is more secure – open source or commercial software? According to this article, open source software is patched more quickly.

Could your use of social networking raise your insurance premiums? According to this article, it could – at least in the UK.

Microsoft Security Essentials – it’s free, it’s good, but is it the REAL Security Essentials? Watch out, because there is a rogue pretending to be MS Security Essentials..

Another small chink has appeared in the armor of WPA / TKIP. This protocol is still pretty secure, but best practice is now to move on to WPA2 and AES encryption.

Are two malware programs better than one? Well, of course – we knew that (but then again, we know stuff).

Spam + drive-by download + Zeus = empty bank account. Watch out for fake IRS (Revenue Canada, etc.) email messages. Zeus is a nasty password-stealing trojan that has emptied many a bank account. It is also being spread through fake AIM updates.

Want to know more about how SQL injection attacks work? Here is a good place to learn more. SQL injection attacks are among the most common web attacks.

Dennis H in West Virginia, US

March 3, 2010