Month: September 2016

4 Things You should do to Prevent any Hack

Posted on by Mario

5-things-you-should-do-to-prevent-any-hacks

It seems like hackers always find a way to attack any sites, if your website is one of them, don’t be upset, re-upload it immediately and do these 4 things right after you find your site is hacked in order to prevent any hack attempt in the future before calling any web developer expertise to solve your problem.

  1. Understand what just happened

When your site has been hacked, there are number of possibilities that may happen regarding to this, first it can be to poor maintenance or due to bad plugins. If you have no idea, if your websites have been hacked or not, you can take a look several hints that can give you signs that you are being hacked:

  • Google has blacklisted your website;
  • Google search result pages show ”this site may be hacked”;
  • Your host has disabled your site;
  • Customers notify you via their local AntiVirus applications;
  • Your website is not behaving correctly or generating odd errors.

Bear in mind that knowing what happens to your website is half the battle since hackers try to hack your website all the time.

  1. Brace Up Your WordPress Security

There are a lot of things you can do, but at least address the following:

  • Generate New Security Keys for WordPress

Step 1 is to copy/paste these codes in your wp-config.php:

define(‘AUTH_KEY’,         ‘>f8WY(G1ED*-uk)mPxG*!6a~^J2toVWSIFOshT${gn|oT t|v8aba<Fh;pFP`yid’);

define(‘SECURE_AUTH_KEY’,  ‘<iR+Ar.`VQ!3HYa#R+AI*MC2Sc,${6v_.L#$t4;)%eZ=@|.b>b:qy|@X]Vb3W|RH’);

define(‘LOGGED_IN_KEY’,    ‘1E>><mq?hvpmS{3D#KF1|x#.rc6sCQHZTZ}*;*Z2t6T*f_z#jGlbzSf@DvLgckKU’);

define(‘NONCE_KEY’,        ‘OXcWKI/9xDf@$yMB27+o/L&bnAROa%Ve4|Ir]6qa+y8p.`}>`I1b7)dmaDi{$?[Z’);

define(‘AUTH_SALT’,        ‘Mb<5yV36&|SS#!gC#^jw*8|)hL-EP@M(mPuAe+;18D|Ju3+Jh239)tRwX4HD([7o’);

define(‘SECURE_AUTH_SALT’, ‘E*1|=#nsgx_Q{:GKa|sJ|Q!>14W&)LEccK-[[ K[=sQM%<D|*UDhq>qOzY5.rw=`’);

define(‘LOGGED_IN_SALT’,   ‘DE[?b$ZN/A25@0_lLnMD>+_$jeEqEFo=>t?-qa{GY4D-2PZD[`C2l.j2Zi(N)~dd’);

define(‘NONCE_SALT’,       ‘bWnj/%_FEz]zF*j9njk^FY?uwDkQU^|c-Tu!Vm3S_U[#c2kaTb+F.vcu=[Jx4wn+’);

Save the file and the first step is done.

  • Reset Your User Passwords

In some cases, hackers will try to attack your sites brutally by guessing your username and password, so please don’t use ‘admin’ as your username and ‘12345’ as your password. In fact, it is important to change your password after a hack and secure it with a complex structure, such as combine upper/lowercase, use special characters and numbers.

  • Reinstall the core

Another important recommendation is to remove and reinstall the WordPress core manually. Instead of updating/reinstalling feature via your dashboard, you can use your favorite FTP/SFTP client and manually replace the files. Usually the attackers like to embed their files deep in your file structures, and a very common is within the core directories (i.e., /wp-admin/ and /wp-includes/).

  • Reinstall your plugins

It may sound too drastic, but this is the only way that you can do to make sure no malicious code remains on your website, this act means a fresh reinstall and hope all the additions and insertions of the hack disappear.

  1. Restore a BackUp after the Hack

Solid backups are necessary to restore your website quickly after a hack. It might require you a few updates, but in this way, you can keep your site up and running.

  1. Keep Your Website Up-to-Date

Older version of WordPres is vulnerable from hacker’s target this is why you need to stay away from plugins without updates in the last two years. You can figure out the version of your WordPress in readme.html file or sometimes even right in your source code.

The point is to keep your plugins and WordPress up to date, this advice applies for activated and deactivated plugins since these are just as vulnerable. Only by this way, you can make sure to update all of your software after a hack.

What is an Interaction Designer?

Posted on by Mario

what-is-an-interaction-designer

Interaction and designer are two familiar words, but when it forms “interaction designer”, not many people truly understand the real meaning of that phrase, in fact, a real graphic designer or web designer may get confused with interaction designer’s job description. If you are one of those, you can learn it below:

Interaction Design

A process which is focused on creating engaging web interfaces with logical and thought out behaviors and actions is known as interaction design. A good interactive design will create desired user experience by using technology and principles of good communication.

There are many fields of interaction design, but there are five pieces that are still useful and relevant today are such as follows:

  • Human/machine communication is the translation of conversations between the device and user.
  • Action/reaction looks at how interactions happen and unfold.
  • State ensures that users know what is happening and why in terms of the application.
  • Workflow ensures that users know who to use a tool or application and what happens next.
  • Malfunction takes into account mistakes that are bound to happen.

In fact, there are more considerations to keep in mind despite the five pieces above, when creating design interactions. You can ask yourself with usability.gov basic questions in six different categories that can help shape how the design comes together.

  • What can a user do with their mouse, finger or stylus to directly interact with the interface?
  • What commands can a user give to interact with the interface?
  • What about the appearance gives the user a clue about how it functions?
  • What information do you provide to let a user know what will happen before they perform an action?
  • Are there constraints to help prevent errors?
  • Do error messages provide a way for the user to correct the problem?
  • What feedback does a user get when an action is performed?
  • What is the response time between an action and response?
  • Are the interface elements a reasonable size to interact with?
  • Are edges and corners strategically being used to locate interactive elements?
  • Are you following standards?
  • Is information chunked into a few items at a time?
  • Is the user end as simple as possible?
  • Are familiar formats used?

Role of an Interaction Designer

An interaction designer should be able to perform a design strategy, identify key interactions of the product, and create prototypes to test concepts and keep up to date on technology and trends that will impact users. Moreover, a person can be notified to have any talent as a good interaction designer, if they find themselves thinking about or asking the questions in the list above, then you are a good interaction designer material.

Moreover, a design is categorized as an interaction design when it has concepts and principles, such as follows:

  • Goal-driven design: Why does your site or interaction exist? Figure it out and make sure your application does this one thing exceptionally well.
  • Interface as magic: You don’t even really see the best interfaces. “the best interaction designs don’t exist: they don’t take a long time to load/respond; they don’t make users think; and they don’t give user’s cause for grief.”
  • Usability: “interfaces which make the state of the underlying system easy to understand and use are favored.”
  • Affordances: ”The best (industrial/interaction)designs are those that speak for themselves; in which, as the saying goes, form follows function.”
  • Learnability: “A great deal of what comprises a usable interface is made up of familiar components. … The best interaction designers don’t reinvent the wheel every time a similar design challenge comes. Rather, they call upon a set of patterns.”

Starter’s Guide to Regular Expression (Regex)

Posted on by Mario

beginners-guide-to-regular-expression-regex

A regular expression is a range of characters forming a pattern that can be searched in a string which is usually used for validation, for example, for validating credit card numbers or for replacing matched text with another string. Moreover, it also has great multiple language support-learn it once and you can use it across many programming languages.

The advantages that REGEX offers may put this function in limelight, but not many developers are interested in using REGEX, in fact, not few people who take a first look at regex, and ignore it completely. Therefore, few developers and web developers can surmount the complexity of REGEX. However, if one can manage to use it, it will produce you with better and faster searching results.

If you get used to JavaScript, you still need to learn all the characters, classes, quantifiers, modifiers, and methods used in regex.

Let’s see a simple example with an explanation. This is a regex.

B[a-zA-Z\d]+

The above regex will look like this in a line, a character ‘B’ followed by at least one of any character between (and including) ‘a’ to ‘z’, ‘A’, to ‘Z’ and numbers 0 to 9.

Here’s a sample of matches in a line highlighted:

Basket, bulb, B12 vitamin, BaS04, N BC company

The above regex will stop the search at

Basket

And return a positive response. That’s because the global modifier ‘g’ has to be specified if you want the regex to look into all the possible matches.

Below are several ways on how to use this expression in JavaScript. The method goes: if found a match return true, else false.

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 var input = “your test string”, regex = /B[a-zA-Z\d]+/;

if(!regex.test(input))

alert(‘No match is found’);

else

alert(‘A match is found’);

Let’s try another method: match returns the matches found in an array.

input = “your test string”,

    regex = /B[a-zA-Z\d]+/g,

    /*I’ve added the global modifier ‘g’ to the regex to get all the matches*/

    ary = input.match(regex);   

if(ary===null)

    alert(‘No match is found’);

else

    alert(‘matches are: ‘ + ary.toString());

How about string replace? Let’s try that with regex now.

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 var input = “your test string”,

regex = /B[a-zA-Z\d]+/g;

alert(input.replace(regex, “#”));