19 Jul 10 The importance of redirects

Yesterday, I discussed how you can redirect your HTML files to PHP files. Why is it important to do so?

There are certainly no security concerns involved here, but you probably don’t want to lose your visitors who may bookmark certain pages, nor do you want to lose search engine traffic, because the HTML links will still show up in those engines until they crawl your changes.

That’s where the 301 redirect comes in. This is the best sort of redirect to use, because it is search engine friendly. What it tells search engines is that the page has moved permanently to the forwarding location you provide, which in this case is a PHP file. Essentially, if you do it this way, the search engines won’t skip a beat, and you’ll keep your traffic. The last thing you want to do is let search engines crawl 404 errors.

If you need help with these sorts of things, or if you need a skilled PHP programmer to help you sort out your conversion, I would be more than happy to take a look at your specific needs, and devise a plan for you. This includes making sure that your PHP code and your setup is secure, as PHP is a valuable tool, but a potential security risk if not handled correctly.

My rates are reasonable, and I offer a wealth of experience that can benefit you. Simply get in touch with me for a custom quote!

Tags: 301 redirects, html, php programmer, search engine, traffic

30 Jun 10 Cross Site Scripting XSS

As a website security consultant, Cross Site Scripting or XSS vulnerabilities are something that I see just as often as the always popular SQL Injection attack.

Cross Site Scripting seems to have originally meant, placing some malicious code on your victim site, that would pull code (usually javascript, but sometimes vbscript) from another malicious domain. Each client that visited the victim site, would end up unknowingly having 3rd party malicious script code executed on his own browser. Now, it has become a term used to describe any type of malicious scripting attack.

The first example is a simple one. Many sites allow user comments. A user could quite easily enter:
This is my comment!<script type=”text/javascript”>
alert(“script!”);
</script>

Any user that hits this affected page, will now see a popup box with the text “script!”. The user could also just as easily have entered a script source of http://www.nastydomain.com/nastyscript.js which will be downloaded and executed.

The second option is to place some javascript code that steals the user’s cookies for that particular site, and then post them to a 3rd party site. His cookies may contain a login and password, or more likely a login hash. The attacker can then use these cookies to hijack the user’s session, and access possible sensitive areas of a site under that user’s account, as that hijacked user.

Fortunately the solution is simple. Either use htmlentities() to ‘escape’ HTML entities, i.e. converting <’s to &lt; etc. Or, use strip_tags, to remove all HTML tag input.

Tags: cross site scripting, html, htmlentitie, javascript, PHP, strip_tags, website security consultant, xss