Phishing, in practical terms, is an attack used by hackers to gain access to private information such as credit card numbers, social insurance numbers and user passwords. Rather than breaking down a physical or technological barrier, phishing is a social engineering attack where targets are typically duped into providing this information directly to false versions of legitimate websites run by the hackers. Personal information can then be used for fraudulent purchases, resale to third parties and even identity theft. While there are no universal statistics on the number or nature of phishing scams, most security websites agree on the following –

-Financial Services is the most targeted industry sector overall
-Paypal, Ebay, Amazon and the major banks are the most targeted companies
-North America is both the primary target audience and the region were the largest number of phishing sites are hosted
-Websites are by far the most popular portals through which to gather information, although an increasing number of phishing scams instruct targets to call a telephone number

Below are screenshots from a phishing email I recently received. Have a look at the warning signs –
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What is Digg?

Generally referred to as a social news site, Digg is technically a user-driven news aggregator. Registered Digg users can “digg” (i.e. bookmark and submit) an article on a web page by submitting a URL, along with a brief description. URL submissions are placed on display for other Digg users (registered or not) to read, comment on, rate, and bookmark for themselves.

How Digg can benefit your blog

Two words: heavy traffic. A popular Digg article can easily send thousands of new visitors to a website in a single day. A website does not need an explicit link to Digg in order to receive the benefits of Digg exposure; however, adding a link at the end of every post will give regular and special interest visitors the opportunity to promote an article to a large news-oriented audience. The larger form of the Digg button also specifies the number of times an article has been bookmarked, which can be used as an indicator of its popularity among targeted visitors.

How to add a Digg button to Wordpress Posts

Digg support can be added directly to a Wordpress blog via editing the PHP code for certain files within the blog’s theme. The main challenge is finding the correct files to edit, since Wordpress themes can have different file structures. As such, this tutorial will be more of a strategy for altering a theme to add Digg support. To address most of the common issues users will encounter, a more complicated theme will be altered.

Prerequisites:

• A Wordpress installation with the ability to edit theme files (generally speaking, online services that do not allow you to upload your own themes also won’t let you edit existing theme files)
• An account with administrator privileges (required for editing theme files)

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What is an IP address?

An IP (Internet Protocol) address is a unique address within a network used by devices to communicate with other devices within the network. Computers, printers, routers, and network hard drives are examples of devices that could have an IP address within a network.

IP addresses are generally assigned according to country and internet provider. There are also some specially reserved IP addresses or IP ranges that are universally understood:

• Local Machine IP – The IP address 127.0.0.1 (localhost) is always synonymous with the local machine. This IP address is valid only within the local machine environment, as every computer is its own “localhost”.
• Private Network IP’s – The IP ranges 192.168.0.1-192.168.0.254, 10.0.0.0–10.255.255.255 and 172.16.0.0–172.31.255.255 are reserved for private internal networks, such as a home networks or corporate intranets. These IP addresses are only valid within the local network and cannot be used if, for instance, a user wanted to connect to another user over the internet. Thus, it is typical for a computer to have an IP address for the local network (e.g. 10.1.2.1) and an IP address visible to the Internet (e.g. 65.34.24.24), which is itself one large network.

For the purpose of this tutorial, private network IP’s will be referred to as internal IP’s while internet-accessible IP’s will be referred to as external IP’s.

Why would I need to know my IP address?

1. Network gaming [internal or external]
2. Running a private server (e.g. FTP, HTTP) [internal or external]
3. Windows file sharing within an home network [internal]
4. … and any time another computer or service needs to identify your machine for commication or software deployment

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