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Anyone that has a regular brick and mortar store, or an online presence such as a website or a blog, needs to realize the power of social media. Although Facebook was considered a trend that might soon go away, it has defied all of the people that said this, sporting over 1 billion users worldwide. There are other social networks as well, showing that the power of social media is here to stay. When you are able to tap into social media, and use it for your marketing purposes, you'll be well on your way to financial freedom. Here are a few tips that you can use to use social media marketing to your advantage when trying to sell your products or services on the web. Talking with your friends on Facebook, or sending them a tweet on Twitter seems like something normal to do in today's society. Five years ago, this was not the case at all. Most people communicated with a regular cell phone, or sent an email to friends and family. But due to the advent of smart phones and social med...

If you want your business to be successful, you need to observe the trends and keep pace with them. One of the current trends that gained a lot of traction over the past few years is social media. We all use Facebook and Titter, we love sharing cool stuff on Pinterest or to keep in touch with friends on Google Plus. Wherever people form communities, word-of-mouth marketing does wonders to a good product or service. People love to share. If your business caters to one of their greatest needs or wants, they will most probably tell the whole world about it. They would be your best and most convincing marketing agents, which you aren't even paying. Social media offers the possibility of very narrow segmenting of your target group. This is very useful for your marketing campaigns, because you'll get a much better ROI when you target your best buyer. You know her profile from your past sales reports, and now you can talk directly to her, using the language she understands and resona...

There are password crackers for almost every password-protected system available. A quick search on the Internet identifies password crackers for Windows NT, UNIX, Novell, PGP, Word, VNC, pcAnywhere, Lotus Notes, Cisco routers, WinZip, and many others. Password crackers can be effective tools to use during penetration testing to help ensure users are selecting strong passwords. If a strong password is used, password crackers can take weeks, months, or even years to crack it. If a weak password is used, the cracker could succeed in hours, minutes, or even seconds. In this chapter we concentrate on OS-specific password crackers and describe their use during testing. L0phtCrack URL: www.L0pht.com Client OS: Windows 9x/NT Target OS: Windows NT Price: Under $100 Description:  L0phtCrack is the premier NT password cracker. The first version provided administrators the ability to extract user names and encrypted password hashes from the SAM database and perform a dictionary and brute for...

URL: www.insecure.org/nmap/ Client OS: UNIX, Windows NT (ported by eEye Digital Security) Target OS: TCP/IP networks Classification: Discovery tool Price: Free Description:  While Nmap is a most powerful port scanner, it can also serve as a more sophisticated ping sweep utility. In this chapter, we discuss only Nmap's ping capability. If the target network is blocking ICMP ECHO requests and replies, Pinger and other normal ping utilities will not be able to identify any active systems. Additionally, the target network may have the most crucial systems configured to not respond to ICMP ping but may allow some nonessential systems to respond to ICMP ping to trick attackers. By finding some interesting hosts that respond to ping, the attacker may not think to use a more sophisticated ping tool to identify hosts not responding to ICMP ping. Nmap provides the capability to perform TCP pings on TCP ports rather than the usual ICMP that everyone associates w...

There are two main types of automated scanners, network-based and host-based. Network-based scanners attempt to look for vulnerabilities from the outside in. The scanner is launched from a remote system such as a laptop or desktop with no type of user or administrator access on the network. Conversely, the host-based scanner looks at the host from the inside out. Host-based scanners usually require a software agent to be installed on the server. The agent then reports back to a manager station any vulnerabilities it finds. Network-based scanners look for exploitable remote vulnerabilities such as IIS holes, open ports, buffer overflows, and so on. Host-based scanners look for problems such as weak file permissions, poor password policy, lack of security auditing, and so on. Host-based and network-based scanners complement one another well. It is very effective to employ both when testing critical systems. Again, you need to be careful when using these scanners. Network-b...

Shortfalls of Vulnerability Scanners While automated vulnerability scanners are an effective tool for helping to secure a network, they do have shortfalls. First, many people tend to rely too heavily on automated scanners, thinking that the scanner can replace comprehensive penetration testing . These individuals don't quite understand how a scanner works. There is a quote used often in the security community: “Computers don't break into other computers, people do.” Therefore, it is unrealistic to expect a vulnerability scanner to replace a skilled penetration tester . While the scanners do identify vulnerabilities, they are not good at chaining vulnerabilities—combining vulnerabilities such as bypassing filtering rules to access a poorly configured FTP server or exploiting one system to gain passwords to another. Comprehensive security testing should identify additional holes that can lead to network penetrations that most scanners would miss. Vulnerability sca...

Vulnerability scanners are automated tools designed to scan hosts and networks for known vulnerabilities and weaknesses. There are a number of these tools on the market. Some are free and others will significantly strain your budget. Network Associates CyberCop Scanner and Internet Security Systems (ISS) Internet Scanner are two of the leading commercial scanners in the industry. These tools essentially perform a series of automated checks against each target, trying to locate known vulnerabilities. Each tool has a vulnerability signature database that it can use to test the host for known vulnerabilities. If the vulnerability does not exist in the database, the tool cannot find it. Additionally, if the database is not continually updated, the tool will not find the latest vulnerabilities and will become less effective. Therefore, the number of vulnerabilities a scanner looks for and the frequency of the updates are important criteria for selecting the right vulnerability ...