CogBlog

Take a look at this interesting map of spam origins on the DiscoverMagazine.com site. Go here for the full world map:
Map of the Spam World

The web spam filtering company Postini developed the map.

I guess all those people in Alberta just have a lot of free time on their hands?

So we were chatting about how popular the phrase "DashBoard" is these days, and I think we coined an important new term:

GasBoard

A "Business Intelligence Dashboard" used primarily to inflate the results of a campaign. There's always a metric that will show and program in the best light. If it's not sales, then maybe it is brand awareness or intent to purchase. Just configure your dashboard properly and every campaign is a winner!

In fact, I think quite a few dashboards out there are actually GasBoards.

So I pulled up the Battlestar Galactica site to see if the 8:00 episode would be replaying later tonight...and it's hacked.

It looks like this guy in Turkey is doing some kind of automatic exploit on Windows servers. Just today, he has successfully defaced over 20,000 sites. Take a look at these stats:
Sites Hacked by aLpTurkTegin

P.S. If you haven't seen Battlestar Galactica, you can't judge us for liking it. Honestly, this is one of the best shows on TV. Really, it is.

In the last few months, I've learned quite a lot about web application security. Not to say that my knowledge is comprehensive--this is a topic where the more you learn, the more you realize you need to know.

One of the very best blogs I've found on the topic is RSnake's ha.ckers.org. Always a fresh article, lots of good links, and very readable for a fairly technical topic. It is worth checking out.

Thursday, he posted a link to this very nice SQL Injection Cheat Sheet. And, he has his own XSS (cross site scripting) Cheat Sheet as well.

Yay, get paranoid everybody!