Statistics from social networking security apps suggest that up to 1 in 5 items on the average facebook users news feed can lead to malicious content.

Rogue or malicious applications may pose as online versions of well known games,  promise you bonuses for online games (such as farmville) or allow you to see certain exclusive content.

They also offer add ons to the facebook structure such as a dislike button or the facility to see who has viewed your profile. Many of these add on features are not supported by facebook.

These Apps gain access to your information when you allow them access to your profile. This can be just to get information on you, or to try and redirect you to malicious sites via links in your news feed.

To avoid being caught out:

Be cautious which apps you allow access to your profile.

Best to ignore surveys which give you free credits etc. Are they free… or are you paying with your profile information?

Try not to follow links to external sites if they look suspicious.

You can download browser protection which comes with most antivirus programs now (eg.  http://www.siteadvisor.com/ ) and if the bar goes red when you follow a link - close the site down if it isn’t blocked automatically.

You can also get facebook apps, which scan your profile, and posts on your newsfeed for links to malicious content. One such example is safego by bitdefender http://apps.facebook.com/bd-safego/ which scans the content behind the links and lets you know when something unsafe appears.

Whilst the facebook environment is fairly safe, there are always people trying to tempt you outside the bubble.

Although we offer our web design services for under £100 this may still be out of the range of the average hobby site owner. There a several ways in which you can get a fantastic looking site up and running, with a bit of effort but a minimal cost.

1) All our hosting packages come with a FREE web builder program, which allows you to select from a variety of designs and colour schemes and build your site online. Simply fill in the content boxes and click publish and there you have your new site – easy. We also offer a more advanced web builder for just £19.99 a year, which allows even more designs, and advanced features such as forums. To see what they look like and even have a go at designing a test site, visit us http://www.byte-internet.co.uk/control_panel.html and have a play.

2) Another great way of developing a site yourself which looks great is by using a Content Management System (CMS). Once installed these allow you to create a site using a control panel to manage the content pages, and insert other items such as polls and news feeds. You will be typing the content in an area similar to word, so no coding or complicated stuff is required.

But how do i install them? I hear you ask. If you have a look at our extend control panel demo http://www.byte-internet.co.uk/control_panel.html you will see that at the bottom of the panel we have a multitude of one click installs. Included (free with every account) are several CMS systems such as Joomla, Mambo, CMS made simple, and WordPress. All of which can be used to create your own website which looks great.

These are 2 great ways of getting an affordable site up and running by yourself even with little or no coding knowledge. All for just the cost of the web hosting!! Our web builders are very simple and guide you through the process of building your site, and the free programs have a wealth of online help and forums dedicated to them so if your stuck just give them a visit.

Good luck and have fun building!

If not up to date with IT terms, these are programs which, when installed onto a webserver, allow you to develop your site without the need for coding. Most the content is filled in by WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get)  editors similar to the notepad or MS word interface.

The CMS or sometimes the blogging tool allow some user interaction with the site (if you allow it) such as commenting on posts. Some even contain forums or free blogging tools.

These are all good ideas and attract more visitors to your site than an otherwise static site would. BUT one of the big problems with this is the amount of  spamming you can recieve.

I recently started up a small site with the ability for anyone to sign up and ask and answer computer support questions (www.byte.org.uk). this also included an option on signup to allow each user to create their own blog. All was well for the first few weeks, with a few users signing up and a couple of blogs. As soon as google got hold of the site and pushed it up the ranks, the spammers came along. suddenyl i had 80+ blogs within a week all of them posting advertising junk and nonsense articles with loads of backlinks, some even showing a whole load of inappropriate (if not illegal) pictures. Although i had a disclaimer on the blogs content, you dont want people coming to your site (especially children) and seeing offensive articles and pictures – it just isn’t good at all.

Management of the site started taking up a lot of my time so unfortunately I have had to stop the signup for blogs and make them request only. This is a great shame, i had hoped that the CAPTCHA box ( a box in which you have to copy text to from a picture which is slightly distorted) would have discouraged spammers and perhaps prevented automated signups, but alas it wasnt enough.

And the point to these ramblings???  Well as trendy as an interactive site is. When you start setting one up, you have to take into consideration the monitoring of the site. Whatever subject your site may be, there are sure to be a few people who think selling furniture on your site, or posting offensive content is great fun for everyone. You will at somepoint have to start being website moderator, and it is worth taking into account the amount of time this will take.

Failure to moderate comments or posts to your site can actually have a negative effect on your reputation – noone wants to come to your company site to find a pornographic image or swearing in the comments.

So if you are looking for a low maintenance site, perhaps a less interactive one is the way forward…

Whilst they can be great free way to promote business, ironically they are also one of the biggest security problems facing a business. Research has shown that up to 30% of a companies internet traffic can be social site traffic (with the youtube streaming onslaught probably a lot more) and it opens company networks up to a whole host of nasties brought in by flaws in these sites and add ons such as the facebook apps.

As a result, though companies use these sites to promote themselves online,  the employees find themselves probably banned from the same sites.

It may be a great annoyance to many employees and a widely unpopular move to ban the sites from company computers but it could save you, if you are an employer, a lot of time and money. Not just because of the time wasting aspect, but also the time and money it costs to repair computers when they go down with a virus – or the potential risk of network intrusion and data loss.

Maybe being a network admin i do have a slightly bias view of this. But i get to see, and have to fix, all the fallout from some of these sites and deal with the bandwidth issues raised by streaming social data. Company networks are very vulnerable to malware especially being snuck onto computers through such social sites, and once on they can be a bit of a pain to rid yourself of.

So if you are an employer dont feel too bad restricting sites in the work environment – it could save your business. If you are an employee give a thought to what your boss is worrying about, and don’t be too hard on the IT Dept

When a little icon then establishes itself on my desktop with no warning I tend to get a little put out. A quick running of all my anti malware and virus software, and look online found it not to be a nasty hijack  but a helpful program uploaded by Microsoft to inform me of the many different browsers that I could be using.

 Microsoft has had to put this browser choice into windows for Europeans, as part of its monopoly penalties imposed by the EU. It tells us of a whole range of different browsers that have been developed by lots of different publishers for us to download free of charge.

Now since I am also a network consultant I tend to try and keep customers on internet explorer, mainly because I have found that it is the simplest, most compatible browser. It may be attacked most frequently but it is also the most quickly updated and patched browser due to its reputation and market position.

Many clients’ machines I do see though have Chrome and Firefox on as well. Not due to any anti-Microsoft rebellion but mainly due to the fact that they saw the link on the Google home page saying “browse the web quicker”, and they clicked on it. They then continue using IE. Many people just don’t understand the web fully so showering people with options is just going to lose you friends and alienate people

Unless you know a bit about the net, then you are probably going to be a little confused by it all. You may have just figured out what you were doing then along comes a popup and tells you that you could be doing it 8 other ways as well. I agree with freedom of choice but finding it for yourself is always better – having it thrust onto your desktop suddenly may not be the way to do it.

 The number of emails I have got by cautious people asking me what has just appeared on their desktop, and why, is testament to this.

 And we can all proudly say that as EU taxpayers – our hard earned cash has made this confusion possible

Phishing emails, if you didn’t know already, are emails that look exactly like a banks official emails and ask you to login to your online accounts, and update information. Sometimes encouraging you with the line that “if not updated your account will be closed”, which is usually enough to get the average computer user worried.

The links on the email however will direct you to a website that looks just like the proper site you are expecting, but is in fact a fake site. You then enter your login details and have effectively given away the key to your internet banking.

All banks and other secure sites continuously promote awareness about phishing emails, but I seem to be receiving more and more official information from my banks via email, offering me deals or telling me I have a message waiting. Which for me, seems to defeats the point of warning customers about trusting bank emails

The point of all this being, when phishing emails are getting so sophisticated, that paypal has to turn up their defences so high it actually catches their own emails. What chance has the normal computer user deciding what is real and what is phishing.

The latest browsers Such as IE7 and 8 do have inbuilt phishing filters to warn you of your impending mistake if you do venture onto one of these sites, but then they cant be totally relied upon, as their database is mainly based on sites already tested, and may let a new phishing site slip through now and then.

The safest thing you can do if you receive an email from your bank telling you you need to login to do anything to your account, is not to click on the email link. Close the email and navigate to the banks site by yourself or via your bookmarks, the site should then update you once logged in.

 This way you know you are on the correct site and haven’t been redirected to your financial nemesis.

If you haven’t heard about us before here is a quick rundown:

BYTE Internet was started in 2006  in Norwich (UK) with a view to give small businesses a cheaper alternative in getting online with their company.

We provide web design (mainly static but have designed some cms system which can easily be run by our clients them selves) Very affordable Web Hosting, Domains, Emails and our most recent addition Online Cloud File Storage ad Backup.

We are always looking for more services to add to our portfolio so if you want to know about anything just drop us an email and we’ll see if we can help yuu. info@byte-internet.co.uk.

Here on our blog we will put forward, what will hopefully be, a few useful tips on the web both for designers and for home users surfing the web.