Lock up your silver and hide your daughters away…
They’re out there – the cyber-outlaws, riding around the net in their virtual black hats, hijacking, impersonating, stealing data, and generally raising hell online. Most normal users of the Internet go about their daily chores, blissfully unaware that these outlaws even exist, let alone how vulnerable one can be to an attack. Until they ride into your site, that is.
So this week we are learning about black-hat hacking and how to prevent it. Now, I love reading novels about this kind of cyber-crime – but I always wonder how much of what is being written is actually possible. These fictional cyber-geek-criminals seem to have way more self-taught knowledge than I could hope to accumulate if I did this program 3 times over! Well, apparently the answer to my question is – all of it and more!
One of the things we are learning about is how to keep our sites safe – how to avoid being scammed, impersonated, or hijacked – how to avoid leaving ourselves and our sites vulnerable to SQL injection, Cross-Site Scripting, or session theft, how to foil all these evildoers who would corrupt our databases, run off with our information, redirect our visitors, and generally cause mayhem on our sites.
To that end, we are going to try an experiment – we are going to try to hack this site. So circle the wagons, and stay tuned for updates.
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