Steelnet Webdesign

The online world poses many challenges for web administrators and webmasters. Protecting your site against malicious intent has become one of the greatest challenges for web administrators and webmasters. Certain countries or regions are noted as being hotspots for hacking attempts against websites, and fraudulent transactions against online shopping carts. The good news in that there are now very targeted methods of limiting malicious attacks on your site without limiting the accessibility of your site for its intended audience.

What are geoblocking and country redirect?. They are methods for locking your site down so that defined countries or regions are blocked from viewing or accessing the site or are redirected to another site (for instance google) if they are on your blacklist. Why would you geoblock or county redirect?. To allow access for your intended audience and to disallow access to site visitors from countries or geographic areas that are high risk for fraud or hacking.

Here are some examples : where a site has a specific geographic area of interest (for instance a local gardening club) there is little merit in making it available to site visitors from outside Australia. And a shopping cart website selling Australian school uniforms has no legitimate audience outside Australia – and  would additionally increase the change of fraudulent purchases or hacking attempts by mailicious site visitors.

The primary benefits of Geoblocking are to lower your monthly bandwidth usage (by limiting access to certain countries or regions) and to minimise the change of hacking and credit card fraud. While the credit card companies have a number of anti fraud measures integrated into their processing (Verified with VISA or 3D Secure from Mastercard). However this doesnt prevent the web administrator from integrating their own site protection such as geoblock and country redirect.
What countries or regions are blackspots for hacking or purchase fraud?.  There are a number of online reports highlighting the most problematic areas in the world for Card Not Present fraud transactions, and they include Eastern Europe, Africa, Pakistan, Israel and Indonesia. These countries and regions are also well known origins for site hackers. So unless you have a redeeming reason for conducting business with these countries or regions it is best to block access to them.
How does a web administrator or webmaster prevent access based on a site visitors their geographic location?. There are three common methods of preventing access : using a 301 redirect (ineffective), using a .htaccess country redirect script (reasonably effective), and the third by using a GeoIP service and script such as Maxmind. They even have preformatted scripts and tools to integrate GeoIP to your site.
The method you use to redirect should be as low key as possible. Creating a lime green and fire engine red flashing skull and crossbones redirect graphic or sending the site visitor to a site with an offensive message might seem like a good idea to start, but is likely to be irritating or inflammatory to the genuine hacker or fraudster and will probably increase their determination to bring your site down or pass through a fraudulent credit card transaction. There is aslo the possibility you may have a genuine site visitor who happens to be travelling though a banned country or region and wont be that impresssed at your content. Here at Steelnet we prefer a to subtler aproach by simply redirecting unwanted site visitors to a major search engine such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, a social media site like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace or a local government, tourist and information site. The advantage to the web administrator is lowering the risk of a more determined attack or fraud attempt (for all but the most motivated of fraudsters or hackers).
The redirects only failing is a site visitor that is using a proxy that is located in one of the whitelisted countries or regions – but at least you will have lowered the likelihood of site access from banned or blacklisted countries or regions.
Here are some links for further reading  :

high risk countries : http://www.onlinefraudguide.com/risk-countries-fraud/
effects of online fraud : http://www.onlinefraudguide.com/effects-online-fraud/
fraud – things to watch out for : http://www.onlinefraudguide.com/identify-online-fraud/
fraud zones : http://www.wymoo.com/countries/fraud-zones/
APCI 2011 Fraud Report : http://www.apca.com.au/payment-statistics/fraud-statistics/2011-financial-year
Hacking Report : http://www.gadg.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/hackers2.jpg

A little offtopic this morning, I have been jousting with my Telstra Android handset. Had it around 4 months and havent really had the timne or inclination to get all the features running on it that I had running on my old symbian based handset from vodafone.

The first annoyance was the lack of a credible email application. Although Steelnet obviously use a great deal of the webcentric sites and applications for SEo and SEM, trusting my company email to a free public cloud based network like gmail makes me nervous, Call me overly cautios, or ven old and reactionary, but I still think the jury is out on housing your business critical information on any cloud, public or private. And yes it can be argued that the pop server our business email resides on before it reaches our inboxes is cloud based, but it is in a discrete location at our ISP and is not geographically spread for disaster recovery like much of the public and private cloud.
So to business : here are the applications that have been installed from the Android Marketplace :

(1) K9 Mail : a free email application, allows pop/imap access to your mail
(2) Call Control – allows timewasting callers (read : telemarketers, software salespeople) to be blocked and dropped.
(3) Alarm Clock Plus – A free alarm application.
(4) WHM Cpanel for Android  allows Cpanel access on the go.
(5) WordPress for Android.
(6) Viper Smart Start – an application that can remotely unlock a car without having to dig your keychain.

Im always interested in any productivity apps, let me know if you have found any that you use every day. By the way Angry Birds is not a productivity app, in case you were thinking of replying…