Wright PC Consulting, LLC

Anyone who has an email address within or on a web site knows all to well what a spam magnet that can be. According to one recent study, spam made up 95% of all email traffic in 2007. Spammers often use automatic email slurping robots (bots for short) to slurp up that address to feed their spam spewing machines. Of course there are good bots, like search engine bots that actually help your site. So, the question becomes how do let those who you want to have access to your email address, like potential customers while defending yourself from the mailbox filling spam?

There are many ways to use coding techniques to “hide” your address from bad bots while allowing legitimate visitors see and use your addresses. While they can be affective, they are sometimes complicated, cpu intensive and sometimes require that potential customer jump through extra hoops to send you a message. So, in a quest for another and hopefully easier solution that reaps similar benefits, I turned to the often ignored yet powerful tiny text file ./htaccess. Acting as a gatekeeper, ./htaccess can allow or deny access to your website based on many variables. Most often, it is used to secure private folders on your server.

After some research, tweaking and trial and error, I have begun testing a small ./htaccess file that seems to have the desired affect. While nothing is foolproof as spammers keep getting more creative, and with a short period of testing, this short yet sweet formula may be the beginning to a less spam filled box:

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^CherryPicker” bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^Crescent” bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^EmailCollector” bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^EmailSiphon” bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^EmailWolf” bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^ExtractorPro” bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^NICErsPRO” bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^Website\ eXtractor” bad_bot

<Limit GET POST>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=bad_bot
</Limit>

I’d be very interested in what other’s have hidden in their ./htaccess file.

Recently we explored ways to secure your data on your laptop computer using TrueCrypt.

However, data encryption is not just for your portable devices. In fact, as data theft and loss increases both by public and government organizations as well as at home, so too should the ways that you protect your data assets no matter where it is stored.

One of the first storage devices that I recommend that clients asses for potential threat are removable media such as flash drives and external hard drives. While these devices make storage and portable access to your data easier for you, it also increases the potential for a data breach for you and your business.

While nothing is absolute, using these steps, you can rest assured that your data that lives on a portable storage medium will be more secure:

• Download and install a disc encryption tool such as TrueCrypt (there are others)
• Remove any important files from the disc to be encrypted by deleting them or copying those files to another disc
• Select the encryption method that best meets your needs
• Using your encryption solution, format and encrypt the entire disc (depending the size and encryption method, this can a very long time)
• Mount and move your sensitive data to the newly encrypted disc

It really is as simple as that. Now your data is still easily accessible, portable and safe.

With all the reports of data loss these days, many clients are asking how they can best secure their own data while traveling with their laptops. For those road worriers that want the ability to transparently access and secure their personal data while traveling, I usually recommend that they consider encrypting their data with the open source solution TrueCrypt.Here we will explore the methods that I use to help protect my own data as well as maintain the easy of use that I had grown used to. While TrueCrypt is a multi platform solution, my current usage as described below is on a Dell laptop with Windows XP Pro.

• Download and install TrueCrypt.
• As I did with creating a backup partition, I created a partition for just my data. But this time, I created it as a file on my data partition.
• Once the new TrueCrypt partition has been created, mount the new partition move all personal data including My Documents, My Pictures, IE Favorites, FireFox Bookmarks, Outlook .pst files, Thunderbird data, Temp Folders and any other data that you want to secure.
• Remap the default Windows folders to the newly secured locations
• Set the encrypted partition as a favorite and tell TrueCrypt to mount it on startup.
• Set TrueCrypt to start at Windows start.

Now, every time Windows starts, TrueCrypt will prompt for your password and then mount your secure partition. While this method is not foolproof, none really are, you can now rest reasonably sure that if your laptop is ever stolen, your personal data will remain safe.