Month: October 2020

October 19, 2020

Domain Related

Reading Time: 7 minutes

If you’ve never heard of Elasticsearch, you can certainly be excused. Here at 4GoodHosting we’ve got some pretty smart cookies around, but as a whole we’re a Canadian web hosting provider who’ll never claim to be entirely full of digital wherewithal. Truth be told I hadn’t heard of it either until recently, but no one had ever suggested to me that I should give a second thought to whether or not I’ll trust it as base for searching online. Right then, get right to the definition you say. Elasticsearch is an open source search and analytics engine and data store developed by Elastic. The appeal of it has always been in the way it allows for searching through huge amounts of data with reasonable timeframes, and running calculations with resultant data in the blink of an eye. However, recent news indicates that there’s a potential downside to using Elasticsearch, and sharing what we know about that is going to be the subject of this week’s entry here. Legit Associations Elasticsearch has been all over the headlines – well, industry headlines at least – recently, and not in a good way. It seems like each new week brings along a new story about a breached Elasticsearch server resulting in troves of data being exposed. But why is this happening with Elasticsearch buckets as predominantly as it has been, and is it legit to associate Elasticsearch with an ever-present risk of this happening? The question then further becomes can businesses leveraging this otherwise very-helpful technology do so to the full extent while still avoid data leaks? Organizations have been using this platform en masse to store information in depositories (aka ‘buckets’), the contents of which then become emails, spreadsheets, social media posts, files and any and all matter of raw data in the form of text, numbers, or geospatial data. The problem for Elastic is that now it’s beyond debate that their storage option is leaving massive amounts of date unprotected and potentially exposed online. Sometimes this leak is disastrous, and the number of high-profile breaches attributed to use of Elasticsearch continues to grow. nvenient as this sounds, it can be disastrous...

October 12, 2020

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Soft consonant constructions are devilishly hard for people who are new to English to understand, and the colloquial form of fishing as ‘phishing’ to describe underhanded and fraudulent information requests on the web is a good example. But if we are to expand on that, many people of any first language will be confused as to why anyone would go to the trouble of ‘phishing’ in the first place. There’s always going to be people with bad intentions in any walk of life, and yes it does require a significant input of time and effort to set up, test, and then roll out a series of phishing emails or something similar. The reason they go to all of these efforts is - quite plainly - that’s there’s money to be made illicitly when they do find someone who’s gullible enough to click through or do whatever else it is that the phishing email requests of them. Most younger people who are increasingly more web savvy will be aware enough to avoid falling into the trap, but for others who aren’t that way and have still - like everyone - been forced to exist in an increasingly digital world it is actually a real risk. As a rule, anything that looks amiss with any type of web communication should be a red flag and reason to discard it. The same goes for any communication that seems ‘odd’ as to why the sender would be sending to you, whether it’s an unsolicited communication or one where it simply seems strange that they would be sending it to you. Here at 4GoodHosting, we can assure you that like any quality Canadian web hosting provider we’ve gone ‘fishing’ many times, but the interest was only ever in catching dinner and enjoying a quiet day on the lake. Obtaining info for fraudulent aims was never part of the equation! But in all seriousness, this is an ever-bigger issue and in response to it Google is introducing a wrinkle for it’s nearly-ubiquitous Chrome web browser that’s going to make it more difficult for ‘phishers’ to get anyone on the hook. October’s Here The Internet giant announced...

October 5, 2020

Domain Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

If you’re one of the many people who enjoy twitter feeds or even the comments section at your favourite news websites, then you may already be well aware that some of the contributors aren’t exactly sitting or standing somewhere with a mobile device or notebook in front of them like you are. What we’re talking about here is ‘Bots’ and by that’s what means is an fabricated identity created in the digital space and armed with AI to be able to participate in convos and the like to further the interests of whatever interest group might be behind them. ‘Russian’ bots are the flavour of the years these days, and it’s believed that many of these non-animate opinion swayers come from Russia. Truth is, however, bots come from all over the place and these days they are all too commonplace. And they’re likely not going away anytime soon, so it’s good to know what these bots are, what they get up to, and – perhaps most importantly – how you can identify bots and put a whole lot less significance on what they have to say. Now it needs to be said that here at 4GoodHosting we’re like any other reputable Canadian web hosting provider in that we’ve never created a bot, and in truth despite our familiarity with all things web hosting we wouldn’t even know how to even if we tried. We imagine that’s there are at least a few of out web hosting customers in Canada who have these malevolent means, but that’s neither here nor there. Let’s spend today talking about what everyday, average individuals like you can actually do to distinguish between a bot and a legit, human contributor. Looks and Sounds Legit, But… Sophisticated bots look and act like human users, and it’s true that most bot activity indistinguishable from human activity to the naked eye. Even the majority of bot detection software struggles with being able to identify the entirety of them. This is a problem, and here’s why – with the ability to look like a million different humans at any time you could do a lot that wouldn’t be possible if...