Do Search Engine Spiders Pick Up Urlâs in a Javascript Menu?
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Do Search Engine Spiders Pick Up Url's in a Javascript Menu?  This subject has been discussed before in length, but solutions have remained personal opinion. A thread over at Highrankings addresses some interesting issues regarding whether or not a search engine spider can extract links from a javascript menu. If the ...
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In a new entry today, Tim Bromhead shares his method for creating "super friendly urls" for a site's users using mod_rewrite:   Today we are going to show how to make the URLs with spaces super easy to type for users. bla.st uses dashes in the URLs to represent spaces eg. http//bla.st/web-design/. We chose dashes over underscores because underscores can get lost with underlined links, and we think they look nicer.   He includes the Apache config information for working with the VirtualHost entry and the simple PHP script to handle the requests. It looks in the SERVER superglobal, at the QUERY_STRING to see what the user is requesting and does an append and redirect accordingly. This example is made to take any form of a space in the URL (including underscores and %20), parse it out, and pass the user along correctly to the page they want.
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Hole could allow remote attackers to access your local search results.
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How Much Page Does Yahoo Search Index?  One of the lesser-discussed facets of Web searching is the spidering limits of search engines. Even if a search engine is a full-text engine, it may not search the entirety of a given page if it's too large. In Google's case the limit is ...
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This is really cool!  I finally get my own comment spam!  For some reason I felt left out of the party.  I just wasn't cool enough for the spammers to consider me worthy of their spam.  Anyway.  I implemented my own little turing test.  Now the comments say:  {{{  Turing Test: Are you a human? (required. Just type yes... this is for automated spam prevention)  }}}  While this wouldn't work for all blogs in the wild I'm sure it will work just fine here in my little corner of the blogosphere.  If spammers really want my blog enough then I'll deploy a captcha.  If they solve the captcha I'll deploy a sentient robot  which will traceroute packets back to the host and then terminate with prejudic ...
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In a new post to his blog today, Felix Geisendorfer talks about view coding - specifically working with a menu and determining which element is active.   One of the challenges many of us have faced before and will face in future is building a menu. Now this of course is very simple assuming that we're just shooting for a static &lt;ul> with some &lt;li>'s containing the links. However the tricky part is to figure out what is the active menu item. I had some code doing this in the past but tried out a new flavor of it today which I call the MacGyver menu for CakePHP as it's a little dirty yet powerful and easy to maintain.   In his included code, he creates a simple navigation from an array of titles/links and, with some sorting, a regular expression and a CSS class, the selected item can be highlighted simply.
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Can small variations in the UK news search engine market produce large variations in the long-term behavior of the worldwide search engine market?
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Gareth Heyes has a new post today talking about one of the vulnerable values in the $_SERVER superglobal - PHP_SELF.   I thought it might be a good idea to gather a few test cases demonstrating the problem. Why PHP allows these URL's is beyond me and it wouldn't take much work to filter out these malicious URL's in the PHP code.   He provides four test cases to show how simple it is to abuse - one using a HTTP header, another pushing XSS through, the third mentions search pages and the fourth a direct code injection.   You can download the code here.
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Web gateway filtering specialist Finjan is reporting a new toolkit that uses randomized JavaScript to stay hidden from virus crawlers and deliver its payload via compromised Web sites.Dubbed by Finjan's Malicious Code Research Center (MCRC) as the "Random JS Toolkit," the malware development package is allowing attackers to create threats that only attempt to victimize an individual computer in the same manner a single time to protect against discovery by anti-virus systems and researchers' automated "crawlers."By dynamically changing the JavaScript employed to deliver each variant of attack being created, and by using random file names that are only delivered to the same machine or IP address once, Finjan researchers said the malware authoring package is meant to avoid the programs used by AV researchers to find new threats emerging on the Web.Typically when automated crawler programs come across new attack samples, they return to the threats' source URLs to verify their names and characteristics and to create signature files that allow their products to block the programs -- or they enter the sites onto so-called blacklists of compromised domains.However, once a machine has been infected with an attack made using the Random JS Toolkit, the threat will recognize that the machine has already been targeted and won't attempt to download it again, thereby thwarting efforts to identify or track the exploits, Finjan experts contend.During the month of December 2007, Finjan estimates that more than 10,000 individual sites were compromised with attacks built using the Random JS Toolkit. Most of the URLs serving as distribution points for the attacks were legitimate sites that had been hijacked, the company said.Among the infected sites were some that would qualify as well-known, highly trusted domains, said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer of Finjan.Ben-Itzhak said the toolkit serves as a prime example of the types of tactics he expects leading-edge malware authors to utilize more frequently in the coming year."We've found the initial 10,000 sites, but we're sure that there are many more that have already been infected. When we can find this number of exploits, it is clear that this must be a very significant attack that has affected a lot of people," he said. "Using the combination of techniques available in this toolkit, the threats that are being created can become very powerful and stay alive to infect people for longer periods of time."Among the types of malware infections being served up using the toolkit, Finjan has observed everything from Trojan viruses and keystroke loggers to botnet recruiting programs, he said.For its part, Finjan's real-time code inspection technology can defend against such threats because it eschews the use of traditional virus signatures or blacklists in favor of constant monitoring for any malware activity coming across a network armed with one of its devices, Ben-Itzhak maintains.Rival AV vendors, including Symantec, contend that features such as the market leader's recently developed "generic exploit prevention," based on behavioral cues, should also be able to isolate and defend against such emerging attacks.Unlike the widespread iFrame attacks that proliferated across the Web during 2007, threats created using the Random JS Toolkit will also be much harder for security researchers to track down because they do not lead back to central sites where the actual malware code itself is hosted, Finjan maintains.Since the involved malware code is loaded directly on a site, and it won't attempt infect the same computer or IP address twice, traditional URL blacklisting and signature-based techniques will likely prove futile against the attack, the company said.However, from what the security appliance vendor can deduce, Ben-Itzhak said the firm believes there is only one malware group currently using the toolkit."From what we can tell, all the information flowing back from the compromised sites is heading to the same server," he said. "This indicates that there is probably only one group controlling this malware code thus far, and that they are probably being very successful; this is just another step forward for the criminals involved to continue to improve their attack methods and remain undetected."Ben-Itzhak said that the involved server is not one that matches any of the company's lists of machines controlled by well-known malware authoring groups such as the Russian Business Network. The server the company is tracking was originally located in Europe, but has recently been moved to China -- and likely will continue to be moved around to avoid detection, according to the expert.Most of the data the security company has seen being sent to the server has been related to online banking username and password data, he said.As part of its investigation, Finjan discovered that one of the Web properties infected with the randomized JavaScript attacks was an online advertising network that serves up as many as 14 million online banner ads per week. The security device maker reported that unnamed company was informed and is currently working to clean out its systems.
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A flaw in the way the Firefox and Opera browsers handle an image file could allow an attacker to see what Web sites a person has visited.
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FaganFinder Search Engine Launches URLinfo  Another great tool from Michael Fagan via his already VERY useful Fagan Finder search page. Michael pinged us today to inform us about his new URLinfo resource that makes finding info about a specific web page/site from a variety of sources just a click or two ...
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Will the increased relevance from Google's new universal search process leave other search engines in the dust?
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What happens when search engine spiders get lost? They cannot figure out what way to go on your site.  They sometimes get confused or other sites are sending them to another way to get to the same page on your site.    domain.com  www.domain.com  domain.com/index.html  www.domain.com/index.html  https://domain.com/index.html  https://domain.com   Some servers use mod_dir which causes additional [...]
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Search engine's traffic-update feature is woven into its map service -- any time you look up an address or driving directions, you can get a reality check by just clicking.-The Washington Post
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Google and Mozilla Firefox Working Together  Google have hosted a customized Internet Explorer search page for many years now specially designed to act as sidebar search. And with the launch of the first final release of the very popular Mozilla Firefox browser, we now have a custom page specially designed for ...
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A few months ago I wrote about Web browser hijacking. It&#39;s a problem a lot of computer users are facing these days. You open your Internet Explorer, but instead of being directed to your homepage, you&#39;re sent to some search engine you&#39;ve never heard of.
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Robots, a.k.a. spiders or Web crawlers are used to feed data to a user, such as Google. Most robots are useful, but some, such as EmailSiphon and Cherry Picker are spambots. Here, you'll learn what robots do and how to gain control over them. By Lee Underwood. 0824