Short answer: YES INDEED - but the price has been SLASHED!  Here’s why…

I occasionally receive an e-mail from someone considering purchasing my popular e-book The Hacker’s Nightmare, asking if it’s contents are still relevant. In this article I want to answer that question fairly specifically, so in future I can save time by referring such inquiries directly to here.

Not so long ago I was very close to pulling The Hacker’s Nightmare off the market, but fortunately I did a little research before taking that step.

Now if you are NOT using Windows XP, don’t stop at the next paragraph — there’s relevant stuff to come even for users of other Windows versions.

You see, the prime focus of The Hacker’s Nightmare was Windows XP and, without actually KNOWING any different, I wrongly ASSUMED that Windows XP (and thus The Hacker’s Nightmare) had run its course. Even though I still use Windows XP on some of my own computers.

But with further consideration I realized that is by no means the whole truth, or the only consideration.

For one thing, much of the book is NOT operating system specific. There are many chapters that deal with the generalities of computer and online security and which contain information that is a valuable education for any computer user, regardless of their preferred operating system.

But I also uncovered a fact that I admit surprised me, and that I’m sure will surprise a lot of others as well.

According to StatCounter.com, as at June 2011, Windows XP still has the lion’s share of the operating system market!

Even now, almost 2 years after the appearance of Windows 7 (released to retail on October 22, 2009) Windows XP still claims 45.14% of the operating system market, compared with 34.31% for Windows 7 and 12.12% for Vista, with the dregs going to Apple (6.3%), Linux (0.8%) and “other” (1.33%).

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Operating System Market Share

Those percentages are accurate for the date I’m writing this article. Obviously they will change marginally with time.

In other words, for writers, developers, etc in the technical space, Windows XP is very much still a force to be reckoned with and cannot be ignored.

So I decided that removing The Hacker’s Nightmare from availability at this time would be premature, and would deny a valuable resource to many people who badly need such a reference. After all, it is very clear that computer users are more threatened today by viruses, spyware, identity theft, password cracking programs, con-men, and so on than they have ever been.

Identity theft in particular has become a multi-billion dollar crime worldwide, and much of it is facilitated by violating our computer-related technologies.

So, for now, The Hacker’s Nightmare will remain available.

But intending purchasers should be aware that, although there have been updates, the book was originally written when Windows XP was the current Windows operating system and that there will be certain references and examples that may be Windows XP specific.

With that limitation in mind, and as an incentive for windows users everywhere to take some action in their own defense, I have also decided to slash the price of admittance to our community.

The Hacker’s Nightmare, which originally sold for US$69, is now a gift at US$27, available only through PayPal’s secure ordering system.

The Hacker’s Nightmare has sold so many copies around the world that I could quite easily afford to give it away for free at this time. But support and answering e-mails takes time, so to do that I would have to include a “no support” condition. And that, I believe, would reduce its value.

So the bottom line is that the giveaway price of US$27 will include the full support that we have always offered: if there is something in the book that you don’t understand, contact us and we’ll help you through it.

But don’t delay — I’ll be keeping an eye on this offer and if it looks like being more trouble than it’s worth I’ll withdraw the book from sale permanently, though existing owners will of course continue to receive the support promised.

To give you an indication of what The Hacker’s Nightmare contains I will list the chapters below.

So don’t be a sitting duck…

The Hacker’s Nightmare :: Table of Contents

NOTE: Subject to change without notice

Notices
Preface

Section 1 – Introduction

Chapter 1: Software Tools and Utility Programs
Chapter 2: Security overview
Chapter 3: The Game Plan
Chapter 4: Basic preparations
Chapter 5: What you should know about your PC

Section 2 – First Line of Defense

Chapter 6: Phishing—the Sport of Thugs
Chapter 7: A Wake-up Call
Chapter 8: The Forward Sentry
Chapter 9: Selecting a Firewall/Router
Chapter 10: Wireless security
Chapter 11: Connecting the pieces

Section 3 – Defense in Depth

Chapter 12: An Overview of Local Protection
Chapter 13: The Importance of Task Scheduling
Chapter 14: Vanquishing the Virus
Chapter 15: Trojans & Spyware
Chapter 16: Walls within Walls

Section 4 – Other Threats and Tactics

Chapter 17: Patches & Updates 1: Overview
Chapter 18: Patches & Updates 2: Microsoft Products
Chapter 19: Patches & Updates 3: Other Products
Chapter 20: Dispensable DCOM
Chapter 21: Keeping Informed
Chapter 22: Managing Cookies
Chapter 23: Backups—surviving a disaster
Chapter 24: Microsoft Word Revelations
Chapter 25: Erase Data Securely
Chapter 26: Remote computing
Chapter 27: The Fine Art of Social Engineering
Chapter 28: Passwords I—Choosing & Using
Chapter 29: Passwords II—Biometrics
Chapter 30: The hazards of “freebies”
Chapter 31: Dirty tricks with extensions
Chapter 32: Taming the eMail Preview Pane
Chapter 33: Icon Spoofing

Section 5 – Additional Strategies

Chapter 34: Restricting ‘removables’—stop data from walking
Chapter 35: Pop-ups from Hell
Chapter 36: Preventing digital product theft

Appendices

Appendix 1: Definitions
Appendix 2: The EndItAll Utility Program
Appendix 3: Installing & Removing Software
Appendix 4: Implementing a Fast Reboot icon
Appendix 5: Identity Theft
Appendix 6: IP Addresses 101
Appendix 7: Anti-virus 101
Appendix 8: Port usage
Appendix 9: Determining Port Usage on a PC
Appendix 10: Browser ‘session cookie’ settings
Appendix 11: Cookie Pal
Appendix 12: Browser Wars
Appendix 13: Floppy Disk Basics

©2012 Bill Hely's "Computer & Online Security" Blog. All Rights Reserved.

This post is a bit different to my norm and is aimed primarily at those readers with some web building experience.

It’s got nothing to do with security but it is productivity-related if you’ve ever needed something like this on your website. Regardless, it’s such a cool facility I just had to pass it on.

More likely you haven’t needed it because you never thought of it, so maybe I can sow a seed…

Immersed neck deep as I am in constructing the new membership website, I keep coming up with new features I’d like to make available to members.

One idea I had a couple of weeks ago was to provide members with a one-click way to send one of the many articles and tutorials to a friend who may be in desperate need of some assistance.

No, I don’t mean the traditional tell-a-friend feature — there’s one of those as well.

This is different. It goes like this…

As you would expect, all membership site content is presented in your browser as a formatted HTML page, and most pages have some server-side programming code contributing to their functionality and appearance.

The usual way to refer someone to a webpage is to simply send them a link to that page, but there are a couple of negatives to that approach. For one thing they can’t view the page if they’re off-line, like say sitting on an aeroplane (a popular place to catch up on reading). Also, in the case of a member sending an article link to a nonmember, the latter won’t get anything at all unless the member sends his login details as well (thus risking excommunication!).

So I thought that the obvious solution was to find a way to create a PDF of any webpage on-the-fly, and automatically attach the PDF to an e-mail addressed to the friend.

Now, there are currently scores of articles in the membership site, a number that will increase to hundreds over time, so retrospectively and manually creating PDFs of every page and storing them for download was out of the question. Even when that massive task was completed it would be an ongoing headache because PDFs would have to be created for all new articles and recreated when pages were modified/updated.

That’s certainly not an extra responsibility I want to take on, so emphasis had to be on automatic, on-the-fly creation of PDFs for individual pages as and when required.

Now coming up with an idea is one thing, but finding the necessary tools to implement it can be frustrating.

The new membership site is hosted on a Windows 2008 Server and for various reasons I’m writing all server-side code in classic ASP, so I needed something compatible with that environment.

I soon discovered that there are very few programs available that could do exactly what I wanted, and of those I could find the majority were very expensive (many hundreds of dollars up into the thousands). But most discouraging of all, flexibility and ease of implementation were often less than one would hope for.

Then I found a website with the strange name of WebSupergoo — and their product called ABCpdf.

Now I’m not going to get into a lot of technical jiggery-pokery. Even on a subject such as this I want to keep it as plain language as possible. Still, some mild tech-speak can’t be avoided, but if you’re in a position to use this solution you’ll be able to follow the language.

ABCpdf is a .NET product that includes a COM interface for compatibility with classic ASP. It is available for C#, VB.NET, ASPX and other .NET environments. In fact you can use it from any scripting language that supports Microsoft ActiveX Scripting interfaces. It is fully multi-threaded and ideal for use under IIS.

In other words it is designed to be installed on the web server and called from server-side code such as, in my case, ASP written on the individual webpages.

So the first step after downloading was installation, which wasn’t a problem at all. After taking a quick look at it my host technicians had no objection to installing ABCpdf on the web server that hosts my site — a 64-bit machine running Windows Server 2008 and IIS7. If your host objects, maybe you should be giving your business to someone who allows more flexibility.

Before giving an example of ABCpdf in use, there is one other slightly techo thing that it is appropriate to mention at this point.

In a previous blog post I explained why it’s important to keep Internet Explorer patched and up-to-date even if you use some other browser on a day-to-day basis. Also the article “Which Browser?” in the Special Topics Module of the membership site discusses this topic in more detail.

I’m taking this opportunity to reinforce that recommendation because ABCpdf is one of those many applications that make use of an existing Internet Explorer component — specifically the “mshtml library”. So please do make a point of ALWAYS keeping your IE up-to-date even if you don’t use it as a browser. OK, back to…

Creating PDF files on-the-fly…

Documentation is extensive and there are many examples in various programming languages. Here is the (almost) exact classic ASP code I use to create PDFs from the click of a link on any membership page.

Sub Create_PDF()

Dim theDoc, theURL, theID, count

Set theDoc = CreateObject("ABCpdf7.XSettings")

' The next line is the new code they introduced for
' on-the-fly provision of your own personal license key.
theDoc.InstallRedistributionLicense "your-license-key-goes-here"

Set theDoc = Server.CreateObject("ABCpdf7.Doc")

theDoc.Page = theDoc.AddPage()
theURL = "http://The-URL-of-the-web-page-to-be-rendered.asp"
theID = theDoc.AddImageUrl(theURL)

Do
 theDoc.FrameRect
 If Not theDoc.Chainable(theID) Then Exit Do
 theDoc.Page = theDoc.AddPage()
 theID = theDoc.AddImageToChain(theID)
Loop

For count = 1 To theDoc.PageCount
 theDoc.PageNumber = count
 theDoc.Flatten
Next

theDoc.Save "C:\Path-to-a-folder-on-the-server\filename.pdf"
theDoc.Clear

End Sub

It really is as simple as that, but ABCpdf is capable of much more than is illustrated by that simple example. Apart from being able to create PDFs from existing web documents, which was my prime requirement, you can actually create PDFs programmatically — word-by-word, line-by-line or object-by-object.

For example, I could easily prepend or append a customized block of text that read something like:

This document courtesy of John Smith for the exclusive use of Marjorie Brown. Join me as a member of  CAOS and get access to a wide range of very useful articles.

Watermarks and extra images are also easily included. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination.

Licensing

There is a trial license built-in to the trial download that will let you use all features of the product for 30 days. If you find it even half as useful as I do you can then purchase a full license for your own continued use.

And that’s where I discovered a shortcoming.

A license key for ABCpdf is a long string of alphanumeric characters, and this key must be plugged into the server installation of the product. If your website runs on a dedicated server, no problem. But if you are one of the many millions of Webmasters whose website is hosted on a shared server, there is a problem.

You see, once the license key is installed it becomes available to all other websites hosted on that same server, thus violating the terms of use. Hence it was always WebSupergoo’s recommendation (insistence?) that ABCpdf only be installed on dedicated servers where the license key would be kept private to the legal licensee.

Now I can’t be sure of the reasoning, but it seems to me that the developers must have originally seen the market for ABCpdf as big-time websites which are invariably hosted on private or dedicated servers. But as we all know there are now millions upon millions of websites whose owners cannot justify the extra cost of a dedicated server.

I mentioned to my contact at ABCpdf that I thought they were depriving a lot of people of a very useful product and unnecessarily limiting their potential market. Well, talk about…

Going the extra yard!

I think it was something like within 48 hours I received a reply saying they had altered the code to allow the private license key to be sent from within the webpage code. I have emphasised that line of code in green in the sample above.

In summary…

ABCpdf is a first class product that works well pretty much straight out of the box. Anyone who is reasonably competent in any of the supported languages should have no problem getting it up and running and pushing out customized PDFs in no time.

And then you might actually start reading the user guide and begin to realise just how powerful this application is.

Highly recommended. Click the link for more information…

ABCpdf from WebSupergoo

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©2012 Bill Hely's "Computer & Online Security" Blog. All Rights Reserved.

If you haven’t yet read my first article discussing the new member site, you really need to start there, or the following may not make a whole lot of sense.
Membership Site Article #1
[Opens in a new window]

In this update I want to begin introducing you to some of the member benefits that will be available through the new site. Today’s topic is…

Your Free Domain Name

For anyone wondering what a free domain name has to do with computer and Internet security, the answer is: very little — by itself. But…

The registration of a domain name is the first step in creating a personal website. Yes, it is possible to have a website without registering a domain name, but then you’d have to ask people to visit you at something like http://207.46.232.182. I don’t think you’ll find that sticking in many people’s minds for very long.

OK, so what’s a personal website got to do with computer and Internet security?

Glad you asked.

Everybody knows what an insidious time wasting plague spam has become, and it’s not going to get any better into the foreseeable future. That it’s a considerable annoyance is universally accepted, but what is often not fully appreciated is just how DANGEROUS spam is.

Spam is the initial carrier of most of the cyber plagues and digital infections that cause the World Wide Web to be a much less safe and friendly place than it should be.

So it follows that any steps we take to curb spam are positive steps in the direction of a safer online experience.

Enter the Personal Website

If you share your contact e-mail address around as something like Me@Hotmail.com or Me@myISP.com, there are going to be three important consequences:

1. Your e-mail address is eventually (and probably sooner than later) going to get onto a spammer’s distribution list. Every time you register, make a purchase, post in a forum or chat room, etc. you risk having your e-mail address harvested.
2. You are a captive of the provider (Hotmail.com, MyISP.com, or whatever) and subject to their rules, regulations, e-mail filters (good and bad), and so on.
3. You do not have a permanent contact e-mail address that you can take with you if you change ISP/host/e-mail provider — or if they go out of business or cease operation for any of a number of reasons. Whatever the reason you lose or need to change such an e-mail address, it becomes a real time-wasting nuisance to notify all your contacts, particularly if you lose your address suddenly and don’t have time to arrange redirections or something similar.

For years I’ve been preaching the value and desirability of everyone having their own permanent domain name and thus controlling their own e-mail addresses.

Now I’m doing something about it!

In the video below I demonstrate just how easy it is to take the first step and get yourself an appropriate personal domain name. In a future video I’ll show you how I’ve made the next step — translating your new domain name into an actual, live, on-the-Internet personal website that’s all about YOU — just as painless.

The default personal website that we give to members includes a contact form that incorporates a “secret” spam trap. The built-in spam trap goes a long way to wards preventing its use by spam bots.

You can also distribute your contact details to friends/associates/etc by telling them: “You can contact me through MyName.com”. That’s really all they need to know. And in the Anti-spam module in the members’ area I let you in on some other tricks that will allow you to create safe e-mail addresses that don’t identify you, and redirect them to one of your personal addresses.

OK, here’s the video…

I very much welcome your comments, questions and even criticisms. Please use the comment form below, and…

Stay Up-To-Date

If you would like to be kept informed of progress and developments with the new membership site just provide your name and e-mail address below. Whenever I have new information to share relating to the new site you’ll be notified.

Given the numbers involved I’m probably going to have to restrict membership numbers initially, as I have to be sure we can service members properly. Also, we just wouldn’t be able to handle hundreds of simultaneous requests for the free website hosting.

Everybody will be catered for eventually, but at the outset preference will be given to those people who register their interest in the new site. So to avoid delay please register below now!

If you have any interest at all in your online welfare and the health of your computer you should stay tuned. I’ll be describing and demonstrating more features in future posts and videos.

©2012 Bill Hely's "Computer & Online Security" Blog. All Rights Reserved.