“In the very unlikely event of a security incident, we’d be in more peril of someone duplicating our application and attempting to resell it than you losing your data or someone stealing your identity.”

Eeeee… wrong answer!! Totally!!!

Well, the service seems very solid otherwise so maybe it’s just a case of not well thought out PR.

Security is a very complex subject..
You can never simply cover all the corners and go to sleep. There are no absolutes. Linear/feed forward thinking of do/pay more/better to get more in not very effective. It’s about being smart, creating a system that will by design minimize certain problems (better than other problems).

So although you really want none of security issues to happen, you must get a very clear priority of things you want to prevent.

At cebelca.biz which is a local small business application the priorities are (from most important to least, number is the level of importance from 100 to 0):

100
A hacker gets to data of our users.
95
A hacker destroys the data of our users.
35
A hacker for noticeable period disables our service.
20
A hacker gets the source code of our application.

To me, our users data is of top priority, they trusted us with their data. And our source code… meh… capable developers want to code and design their solutions according to their ideas, not copy someone else’s stuff and get a outdated copy of something that already exists.

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Zelo hvaležni smo 5 “beta” preizkuševalcem in 1 preizkuševalcu za uporabniško izkušnjo, ki so nas zasipali s povratnimi informacijami. Naša naslednja naloga je sprocesirati vse vaše povratne informacije in iz njih narediti naslednjo verzijo. Hvala!

Whois info

• Added support for .si .fr .eu domains to the .com .net .org .biz .info .us that were there before

External sources info

• Added number of links to your website in DMOZ directory (and link for details)
• Added number of links to your website in Yahoo directory (and link for details)
• Added information if your website is flagged as suspicious by Google Safe Browsing diagnostics

Front page info

• Added detection of ads from Toboads/Httpool and ADPartner

Front page security and functionality warnings
This group of information is more technical and is just at it’s infancy. Remember, this is the Beta.

• Added listing of external links (href-s). This can also be helpful at checking if your website got hacked
• Added listing of external inclusions (src-s). This can also be helpful at checking if your website got hacked
• Added so far called “Hacking hotspots”. A listing of html/javascript code that could mean that your website got hacked. And can also mean perfectly normal code, as long as you know who put it there and what it’s doing. We detect common patterns of hacking here, javascript keywords often used at hacking attacks, suspicious words, extensions…
• Added so far called “Error hotspots”. Detection if your website is possible throwing an error.

Smaller incremental updates

There was also a lot of smaller incremental updates and improvements that I won’t list here (and happen all the time).

We want to know what you think

We are very grateful to our beta testers for all the feedback they are giving us. If something is itching you about Site Assistant, let us know! That’s what beta stage is all about.

www.site-assistant.com

Few examples of what site assistant does:

- It checks your web-site’s front page and displays most important information to you (like Title, Meta tags, Pageload time, Advertisements on the page, Statistics you use)

- It checks your domains who-is record and show systematic information about it like (Date of expiration, Last update, Registrar, Age of domain…)

- It checks external sources (like Google, Yahoo, DMOZ, Alexa..) and reports you number summary of relevant information (like indexed pages, back-links, page rank, Alexa position, google safe-browsing warnings…) and links to pages with detailed view

- It lists external links and external sources on your website front page, it warns about known patterns of hacking attempts, spam related words, errors…

- A simple to use notebook to write down tasks, ideas or messages for others on per website basis.

Public beta offer

Site Assistant is currently in public beta and if you sign up you get to manage up to 30 websites for 1 year for free of charge.