Valentine’s Day Spamming

As a result of the widespread usage of internet, there is a major threat on phishing crimes and attacks. It was estimated that spamming attacks are in rise and there is steep increase of 20% this year. Spammers and attackers select forums, social networking sites and mail for attacking. Special holidays like new year, Christmas and Valentines are considered to be the right time for spammers to attack. In the last few, in terms of spam attack South America, Japan and India are considered to be highest regions of attack because of the widespread usage of Internet Connections. India, Taiwan, Thailand and Chile are the predicted to be the countries of origin of spam.

As the Valentines Day just got over and world cup cricket approaches, researchers are detecting a strong increase in the spam attacking. Spam gift cards, greeting cards, designer goods, flowers, and financial services seem to be the most popular. In the name of online ticket offer, spammers attack. It also believed that the spammers are looking to steal the credit card info and actually buy something from one of the spam sites. So Unsolicited mails should never be trusted and responded. Users should be careful not to click on links or attachments contained in unsolicited emails or instant messages. Many Spam Filters are available for filtering the spam from internet.

Usually, spammers know what people look for. For example in the Valentines season, we will get a mail asking “Do you want to send a flower to your loved one?” When we open the mail and click the link below, we will find a message telling there is no such offer exists and if you want to unsubscribe, enter your mail address below. If the mail id is entered as per the instruction, it is like handing over the mail id to the spammers. Similar to the increase in spam attacks, the spread of malware has also increased.

Sometimes spams being are sent to our mail adapting very tricky methodology. During special occasions like birthdays and New Year, we will come across some captivating mails and greeting cards in our inbox. The recipient will look very familiar to us. When we intend to open it, it would ask to install software and when the same is done, malicious software or spam messages get downloaded in our system.

Recently, the most famous social networking site Facebook was attacked by a application called Rouge. It was the new application launched in the Facebook especially for Valentine’s Day. Users came across a Valentine’s Day special love poem posting application and without knowing it was the spam content, they added it. As a result it added spammed the victim’s friend list.

This spam named Porambski, as a result made 160000 Facebook users account to get hacked. It has also sent 7 million spam messages and 4000 people closed their Facebook account. Facebook received plenty of complaints because of this attack. Federal court of California declared judgment in the favor of the Face book.. The court ordered him to pay compensation for the damages he made to the company. Spammer Porembski is blocked from using this site

WHOIS Reports

WHOIS is a response protocol that is widely used for querying databases in order to determine the registrant or assignee of Internet resources, such as a domain name, an IP address etc.

When a domain is registered, the name and contact details of the domain holder along with other details like registration date, IP address, name server details etc are entered into a database called the WHOIS database.

The WHOIS database is accessible to all and at all times. Query services are known as WHOIS lookup and many websites offer this as a free service. One of such website is .com

Getting a whois report

Open this website in your browser:

http://greatstatistics.com/whois.php

Fill in the website in the empty field and hit the Whois button. If you did this right you should see a report like this.

There will be four options available.

· DNS Records shows DNS lookup analysis for greatstatistics.com. The Record gives you the information of greatstatistics.com Ip address, name servers, and the state of authority (SOA) records.

· WHOIS information will give you details such as Registration, Domain Name,Registrant, Creation Date, Expiration Date, Domain servers in listed order, Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Billing, Contact, Status.

· WEBSEARCH Lists all the related sites

· Last option lists the details of Whois Data, Website Keywords and SEO Stats,Related Site Information,Related Websites for Greatstatistics.com.

A WHOIS lookup is useful when you want to

• check the availability of a new domain name
• find or contact a particular domain name holder
• check the expiry date of a registered domain name
• trace the identity of a spammer etc.

The downside of all this (for a domain holder) is that there is a lot of personal information that is available to the public through the WHOIS system. This provides ample opportunity for spamming, identity thefts and the likes. Telemarketers, spammers, stalkers and identity thieves often scour the WHOIS database for potential victims.

There could be a number of other reasons (including business) why a domain name holder may not want his details publicly visible in the WHOIS database for every domain he owns. All of these could be valid ones too. All the same, in this age of ever increasing cybercrimes, security considerations alone should be enough to tilt your decision in favor of hiding from the WHOIS.

Hiding yourself from this public database is in no way illegal. You can always use a proxy server or opt for private domain registration to conceal yourself from the WHOIS lookup system. Your domain registrar will be able to provide you specific information on how this is can be implemented.

Social Media In India

Today with all the business and business related activities interconnected globally, Social media is essential for getting the message out about a business, its products and services.

It doesn't matter if a company is focused on marketing, or public relations, or sales, the social web requires that businesses spread as wide a net as possible.

To flourish in this environment, businesses must integrate a comprehensive strategy for growing and retaining consumers. This means putting a marketable brand in front of the target audience, wherever they may be.

Social Media in Business is for key stake holders as social media can turn communication into a interactive dialogue and impact on business practices and processes.

Some of the ideas of using social media to see greater success with small business are

1. Marketing. Participating in social media is a fast and easy way to market your small business to others in a place online where you’re guaranteed loads of traffic and it’s free. Just participating in your favorite social media platform like commenting, voting, sharing information will make you stand out as a helpful member of the community and make sure others remember you.

2. Branding. Through the information you share in social media, you can show your expertise, building brand and authority within the community of your choice. A business blog can certainly help you do the same.

3. Traffic. Nowadays, social media should be used first and foremost to get a hold of some of the elusive traffic that can be difficult to capture at first simply by blogging. Sharing content or even just a link to your blog via social media can make all the difference in the world in terms of the traffic you can begin attracting almost immediately.

4. SEO. Whether the social media platform you use passes search value directly to your Website or not as a result of participation, it is certain that the visitors you attract including those who may use social media to search for their own content.certainly will. Sharing your content or simply links to your site will encourage first visits and then inbound links from the very niche you are targeting and will surely eventually have a positive effect on your Search Engine Optimization.

5. Networking. Social media allows you to make connections not just with those in your industry but with potential customers and those who might refer customers to you.

6. Community. Building community goes beyond traffic and visitors to your Website. It has to do with how engaged those visiting your Website are, whether they share your content with others, refer people in their network to your content, products and services and so on.

7. Authority. Social media helps you gain authority for your content Website and brand by letting you share it more widely and more quickly

Enhancing Sales application with time zone

Today globalization is in the fast pace and almost all the companies have their customers worldwide. Business operations have to be carried out for their customers though there is a time difference between countries. A customer is called at 9:00 AM on the East coast only to find that your customer is on the West coast and its 6:00 AM and the customer is being waked up. This happens all the time.

Many business applications require time related information for sales and other related activities. It would it be great to add the time zone in formations to these applications.

Basically a time zone is a region on Earth, more or less bounded by lines of longitude that has a uniform, legally mandated standard time, usually referred to as the local time. By convention, the 24 main time zones on Earth compute their local time as an offset from UTC.

There are many tools available for calculating time between two countries, time zone map, airport times of different countries, finding distance between two countries. These tools when available online are undoubtedly helpful to business people.

There are also many resources available for finding the type and resources of time zones.

For example there is a tool called Meeting Planner which allows you to schedule your international business events across world countries by finding the time when everyone is in their business hours. You can choose time zones and multiple locations of our choice and identify the best time to set up your meeting.

Another example of one such tool is finding the difference between two countries.

We can select the time and date of a particular country and find corresponding time and date of the required country. With these results we can plan the meeting accordingly.