Trends such as virtualization and cloud are now reality, and already many SMBs have transformed their IT architecture by adopting these new technologies. During the transition, some tasks will remain best served with physical servers and on-premises storage so the best data protection strategy for SMBs seems to be one that works across the physical, virtual, and cloud elements of their environment.

What do we mean by SMB? Small medium business.

Cloud computing means hosted services, where the user needs a PC or any internet enabled device. It's an on-demand service as per the contract with the service provider. Customers only pay for the usage as per their contract. I'll cover more on coud computing over the next few posts.

Recycling your hardware technology - do it right
The U.S. State Department lists Ghana as one of the world capitals of cyber crime. Abetted by an infinite supply of “recycled” computer parts unknowingly supplied by well-meaning people like us, identity thieves troll the markets for hard drives that reveal private financial information left behind by the original owners: bank account numbers, credit card information, records of online transactions, it’s all there.

This is not what you signed on for when you brought your used electronics to a recycling center and watched a volunteer in white cotton gloves load them on a cart and wheel them away. Read more...>>

*** Read through this article carefully. Also, if you are disposing of a computer, hard drive, memory key, CD's, DVD's, etc. please remove all your data files, or break the CD/DVD. If you have an IT staffperson, get them to scrub the equipment.

BLACK HATTERS SCAM: You have 1 lost message on Facebook, to recover a message follow the link below. They are claiming that you have a new message on Facebook, but via some terrible tragedy, it got lost. There are different versions, but generally along the lines of “Facebook sent you a notification” and “You have 1 lost message on Facebook, to recover a message follow the link below:” followed by a link that takes you to a site. Black Hatters are using it to generate hits and therefore revenue.

Interlinking: incoming links are important for search engine positioning. The practice is of building multiple websites and linking them together to build the overall link popularity. This tactic is difficult to detect from a user standpoint unless you end up with multiple sites in the top positions on the search engines in which case it is likely that you will be reported.

Duplicate Sites - this is an older tactic, I'm sure you may have seen online stores that have exactly the same content at different URL's with tiny changes in esthetics.

This is not done as much anymore as search engines have methods for detecting and removing duplicate sites from their index. If the site is changed just enough to avoid automatic detection with hidden text or the such, you can once again be reported to the search engines and be banned that way. Black hatters continue to tweak sites to make them less identical, so the battle continues.

More on black hat techniques: redirect hijacking: The black hatter creates a web page on a high-page-rank domain with a 302 redirect to the page they are trying to hijack. The search engine follows the redirect to the second page and indexes it, but on the SERP, the URL of the indexed page will be that of the page with the redirect. In this way the black hatter will own the SERP, and the page with the content will be de-indexed. It can be further cloaked so human visitors to the page will go to the desired page but search engine spiders will see the 302 redirect.

Black hat technique doorway pages are webpages that are a standalone page designed and built specifically to draw search engine visitors to your website by acting as doorways to your site, tricking (or spamming) search engines. A doorway page looks like a one-page click-through advertisement for a website. They are also known as bridge pages, portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages.

Google can penalize a website by delisting it. Here's an example of a typical response to a webmaster's inquiry on a website not being visible or dropped by Google that used a doorway page.

From: Google Information for Webmasters - My Web Pages Are Not Currently Listed
"Reasons your site may not be included:
You employ doorway pages. Google does not encourage the use of doorway pages. We want to point users to content pages, not to doorways or splash screens."

Hidden text and hidden links are content that is not viewable by visitors but are seen by search engines as they crawl the website. Both of these SEO techniques may result in some original success in the form of increased search engine rankings. However, if the use of these techniques is detected it could result in your website being penalized by the search engine.

Hidden text may be done by matching the color of the text to the background. Or blocks of text inserted via css. Or using java script to hide areas of the page. Hidden links can be links that are so tiny they are not visible to the eye, 1px for example.

Cloaking involves serving websites that are specifically tailored for the IP address of the visitor. This enables websites to serve one website to regular visitors and another to search engines.