Ten Myths About Social Networking For Business - Forbes

Here is a short guide to social networking misconceptions. Each is accompanied by a tangible action plan that you can take right now.

Myth 1: Everybody is on social media.

Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr

Why it’s perpetuated: Experts will show you pretty statistics on how more than 80% of people heard of a product through social media. This is a scare tactic to get you to hire them. The truth is social media is not on every one’s radar–not yet, anyway.

Action plan: Even if your target demographic is not on social media, you can harness the power of the Web by making it easier for search engines like Google to find your website (known by geeks in the trade as “search engine optimization”). Remember that this approach takes some time to gain momentum.

First step: Pepper your website with well-trafficked key words. How to pick them? Go to the Google Keyword Tool and enter about 20 or more generic terms that relate or describe your product or service; look for relevant terms that get several thousand monthly queries but it’s not enough to find popular key words.

You have to find ones where your site can compete–that means finding words that, if typed into Google, will spit out a page of results where your site ranks nice and high.

The key to ranking high on a search results page is to have as many high-quality sites as possible pointing links to your site (this goes for articles, information graphics and other forms of content, too).

A high quality website is chocked with content and follows Google’s Quality Guidelines. How many high-quality links do you have to attract? There’s an easy way to get a feel for that number.

For each key word, copy web addresses of the top sites that pop up in Google when you search on those key words. Then paste each of those web addresses into www.MajesticSEO.com and click “Explore.” Instantly you will see how many other sites are pointing to each particular web site.

If the first 10 addresses you chose are each attracting tens of thousands of links, it’s probably not worth your time to try to compete on that particular key word to get quick exposure on search engines.

However, if the third or fourth site down from the top of the search results page is only attracting a few hundred links, you just might be able to hoist yourself onto that top search page in a few months or less with some concerted effort.

How to increase the number of links to your site quickly? Start by courting relevant bloggers. Find the most active scribes by searching relevant keywords on Google Blogsearch.

Send each blogger a short, not-too-sanctimonious email saying you’re a fan of their work, and that you might have some content you think their readers would really enjoy; include a link to your site in the message.

Interested bloggers will refer to your link in their articles, making it more popular in the eyes of the search engines.

DIY: LDAP user management with LAM

We've tried a lot of LDAP administration tools, and they all pale in comparison to LDAP Account Manager. Here are some details about this powerful tool.

Ah, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), that feisty, pain in the keister system that can be a real joy to set up and administer. Seriously, someone needs to create a distribution based solely on LDAP such that you put the disk in the machine, boot up, install, and enjoy it without having to go through a boat trip on the River Styx to get it up and running.

Until then, there are a handful of tools designed to make life more tolerable for the LDAP admin. One of those tools is LDAP Account Manager (LAM).

Features

• Management of various account types
• Profiles for account creation
• Account creation via file upload
• Automatic creation/deletion of home directories
• Setting file system quotas
• PDF output for all accounts
• Editor for organizational units
• Schema browser
• LDAP browser
• Multiple configuration files
• Multi-language support
• Support for LDAP+SSL/TLS

Two versions: LAM and LAM Pro

LAM comes with the tool’s standard features. LAM Pro comes with the standard LAM features, plus User Self Service, Additional Account modules, Run Custom Scripts, Access Levels, Password Reset Page.

Look at the full feature matrix for the differences in features. The costs for LAM Pro are:

• Single computer: New license $240 USD / Upgrade $180 USD
• Company license: New license $800 USD / Upgrade $600 USD

Installing LAM

Beyond having LDAP installed, the requirements for a LAM installation are:

• Apache webserver (SSL recommended) with PHP module (PHP 5 >= 5.2.4). Other modules for Apache include: ldap, gettext, xml, and optional mcrypt.
• Some LAM plugins may require additional PHP extensions.
• Perl (optional, needed only for lamdaemon).
• OpenLDAP >2.0.
• A web browser that supports CSS2 and JavaScript (The Chrome browser has a problem displaying some of the pages correctly.)

Installation is quite simple and well documented (on a per-operating system case). After the installation is complete, point your browser to http://ADDRESS_TO_LAM_SERVER/lam and you should see the LAM login page. By default, the user credentials are:

• user: admin
• password: lam

Be sure to change the master password immediately upon login.

Using LAM

After you log in to LAM, you’ll see the main window, which is where you’ll do all aspects of LDAP account management (Figure A).
Figure A

You can even add Samba domains from within LAM. (Click the image to enlarge.)

To see how simple LAM is to use, click the Add User button. From the Add User window (Figure B), various user types can be added. You’ll notice that regardless of type the minimum that can be entered for a user is the lastname field. This is standard operating procedure for LDAP.
Figure B

A sample of the Add User window for the UNIX type. (Click the image to enlarge.)

Various features or warnings

• If you need to edit OU entries, browse the schema, edit the profile, run the test, etc. and click the Tools link. Use caution when editing any of the profiles or OU entries.
• The Tree View (Figure C) might appeal to many old-school LDAP users because of its more familiar layout.

Figure C

You can see everything laid out in reference to its standard LDAP organization. (Click the image to enlarge.)

• You should utilize the PDF feature. It allows you to download PDF documents of users, groups, hosts, etc.
• The server information will give you: Managed Suffixes, LDAP Version, Config suffix, Schema suffix, and SASL mechanisms.

Bottom line

All of the tools I have used that promised to make LDAP easier have paled in comparison to LAM. This web-based system can have any LDAP admin, regardless of experience, working serious magic with their LDAP accounts.

Plus, when you’re on a tight budget, deploying and managing LDAP (over Active Directory) will save some serious cash. And anyone with a DIY mindset will appreciate the flexibility of LDAP, but not every DIYer wants to have to take the time to learn to manage LDAP accounts from the command line.

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Phishing Gangs Hosted by Paraguyan Government servers

Phishing gangs have been getting bolder of late, and there's no clearer evidence than the cache of phishing data that researchers at Sunbelt found on a site owned by the Paraguayan government.

The researchers discovered that a site belonging to the federal government in Paraguay is currently hosting a fairly large drop of phishing information related to attacks on banks, insurance companies and other targets in the U.K.The targets include some of the bigger companies in the U.K. business world: Barclays, Lloyds, Halifax and others.

This hidden cache, while sitting on a relatively high-profile server, is not much different than drops that have been found on servers all over the world. In many cases, researchers will sit and watch the servers in hopes of learning something about the gang behind the phish. In this case, the Sunbelt researchers have notified the site owners.

No less than fourteen different banking / financial services phishes including Barclays, Abbey, Northern Rock, Halifax and Lloyds TSB. Clearly, someone is desperate to get their hands on as many UK banking credentials as possible. These phishes are all online at the moment although some appear to be flagged in browsers such as Firefox. We’ve contacted the hosts and hopefully all of the above will be offline shortly.

The server on which the data is being hosted belongs to the Central Department of the federal government in Paraguay. But that doesn't seem like much of a bother or a challenge to the gang behind the attack. It's just another server on which to hide their wares; one's as good as another.

DDoS Attacks Targetting Web Servers over PCs

Security experts have warned of a new distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that targets full on web servers rather than individual PCs.

The hackers infect servers with an application and, through a very simple software program, are able to identify the URLs they want to attack and hit them in a click of a button.

Imperva, the security firm which discovered the attacks, has the source code for the original application, along with screenshots, showing it only contained 90 lines of PHP code.

“Although servers are typically harder to compromise than PCs, by capitalising on their greater horsepower, the hackers create a much more efficient and powerful DDoS tool using servers as the attack platform,” said Imperva in a statement.

“By using web servers, the attackers are even less detectable. Trace backs typically lead to a lone server at a random hosting company.”

Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer at Imperva, has claimed that unlike most DDoS attacks, this is not a one off and the attacks “will be ongoing.”

He advises companies to be on the look out and monitor Google presence to check if they have been compromised.