Nate Covington

My client forwarded me this scam-solicitation earlier today and I am posting it as a warning to everyone - watch out for this "Web Envy Solutions" based out of Stafford, TX.  

The interesting part about this particular scam is they didn't email it to my client: they FAXED it!  

End-to-end encryption is one of the key features promised by ProtonMail, with a zero-access setup ensuring that not even ProtonMail can see what your messages are about. What’s more, the code and cryptography that ProtonMail is built on open source and available for anyone to see, so there’s no chance of any back doors being hidden away.

On top of the encryption, the service offers other features designed to protect your privacy. You don’t need to provide any personal details when you sign up, for example, and ProtonMail doesn’t keep IP logs of your account access. There’s also the option to set an expiration date for sent email messages, so you can use your email account more like you use Snapchat.

I noticed recently that a handful of sites had broken pagination: clicking through "Page 1 - 2 - 3 - 4" at the bottom of my blog pages, for example, were leading to URL issues where it didn't matter if you clicked on Page 3 or page 4, both pages were linking to /page-2.html or similar.

Deciding whether or not to show the number of or "hits" or "views" that an article has received is easy with Joomla: you toggle them globally, and on a per-article basis. So if you have an blog with relatively low traffic, but you have a popular article where you want to show how a hit counter, it's easy: disable the view count globally and enable it for the individual article.

After a while, this starts to get old, because you generally post an article without the hit counter showing and then if it gets a lot of traffic, you want to turn it on.

General Strategy: Multiple "Wallets"

Your day-to-day wallet will probably be tied to a centralized bitcoin exchange, like a Coinbase account. With Coinbase, you can create multiple wallet addresses under a single account (suppose you have 3 or 4 businesses, each could have their own Wallet Address that gets used for receiving payments). I think of Coinbase as your starting point: you'll most likely be using Coinbase to convert your $USD-based checking account funds into Bitcoin (or whichever cryptocurrency you choose).

Create your free Coinbase account now!
(affiliate link)

Your second wallet should be created manually, not connected with Coinbase. 

Continue reading this article on my blog...

A client recently received this letter with CORRECT domain expiration date and no clear "SOLICITATION" warning. 

In the text I circled the only actual disclaimer stating "This notice is not a bill, it is rather an easy means of payment should you decide to switch your domain name registration to Domain Registry.  

The real scam here is they were trying to charge $50/year for domain registration!  This should be lower, more like $10-20/year depending on whether you have a dot-com or dot-org or something else.  

For anyone wondering if their Twitter feeds are doctored...

Public Service Announcement:
Beware of the latest Craigslist scam, where they attempt to gain access to your Google account by tricking you into sending them the two-factor authentication codes!

While the GDPR laws are written for EU countries, many of my enterprise-level clients have been asking me to add scripts and plugins related to addressing these basic rights:

1. The right to access.
2. The right to be forgotten.
3. The right to data portability.
4. The right to be informed.
5. The right to have information corrected.
6. The right to restrict processing.
7. The right to object.
8. The right to be notified.

(original article)

Ecommerce site’s “blind trust” makes the service a perfect place to dump data.

Hackers are abusing Google Analytics so that they can more covertly siphon stolen credit card data out of infected ecommerce sites, researchers reported on Monday.

Payment card skimming used to refer solely to the practice of infecting point-of-sale machines in brick-and-mortar stores. The malware would extract credit card numbers and other data. Attackers would then use or sell the stolen information so it could be used in payment card fraud.