In the past 18 months hacker attacks have increased by 600%. Protecting your most valuable marketing asset – your website – could not be more vital than it is today. Security ambivalence could lead to spam links, injected adware or malware – all of which could result in the degradation of your website rankings, online marketing performance, and sales. There is also the strong possibility you could be delisted (or sandbagged) by the search engines.

Hackers generally target innocent, legitimate websites with their drive-by-download malware in order to send out mass viruses. In former days they spread viruses through executable files via email but that’s too much work for the newest breed of black hatters.

Every month more than a million pages are infected and Google delists hundreds of websites, so its very important to be preventative, not reactionary when it comes to your website security. Here are a few tips you can consider towards protecting yourself:

1. Consult Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

2. Perform a Vulnerability Assessment

3. Assign someone on your team security maintenance and request regular reports

4. Change passwords regularily (although some softwares allow modifications without passwords)

5. Be aware that advertising displayed on your site could be a source to bring in malware since most include direct links to other sites

6. Check out Juniper and Cisco Firewall Solutions

7. Install anti-malware to detect and quarantine infections

8. Remember there is no perfect preventative measure so read and be pro-active

Social networking sites also pose some additional security hazards. The usual advice, not to give out birthdates and carefully screen every link request are obvious. But how do we know if the link itself is secure? On Twitter a 17 year old created a cross-site scripting worm that could have affected every account holder. This points to future Web 2.0 worms which could threaten other social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and My Space.

A former FBI computer forensics examiner, who heads up Facebook’s security team recommends reporting malware, not sharing passwords, and bailing out of Windows to Mac or Linux.

As web applications become more sophistocated and mobile devices outpace PCs in adoption, attacks will only increase over multi-platforms and sites. As many attacks are now  wide scale and automated we need to fight back in some concerted way. It is welcome news that President Obama has made cybercrime a priority by committing some serious dollars to fighting it. He very recently unveiled his White House Cybersecurity Policy.

The web is a powerful medium where the elusive malware attacker lurks understanding very well the vulnerability of our ecosystem.

Facebook has become a lot more than a social networking site.With 200 million visitors, 850 million photos, 8 million videos, and one fifth of all internet users with a Facebook account, Facebook is changing the future of the internet and how it will be defined.

The Facebook vision is centred around the “Social Graph”. This is the place where people meet, use their real names, addresses, share friends, likes and dislikes. It is also the place where we store our online diary which contains our most personal data. Facebook stores all our news, birthday wishes, and trashy bits of data on roughly 40,000 servers. This data is protected from the Google Crawlers. With Facebook Connect we can access our data, network and upload information from over 10,000 different sites and applications.

As a search engine Facebook could  pose a formidable foe to Google. Imagine searching friends feeds for opinions on  purchasing a new car model. Word of Mouth has always been the strongest form of advertising there is and one could argue a more powerful influencer in a purchase decision than  the Google algorithum.

Facebook Connect and Creative APIs available through Open Stream allow us to read our friends news feeds outside of Facebook. However, everytime we use these features more data is collected on us. This begs the question on where the company is going in terms of adhering to permission-based principles and our privacy. Users have already rebelled twice when Facebook attempted non-permission based personalized advertising that was creepy. Behavorial targeting that results in the delivery of relevant ad copy is fine as long as it relies on aggregage data or anonymous search activity.

The Facebook team has been anxious to sink its teeth into a serious revenue model but the fact is that models are elusive in the Social Media space. You have to keep experimenting until you get it right. They may have a winner with the Live Stream Box, a feature that any website owner can enable to allow Facebook users to connect, share and post updates in real-time as they witness an event online. There are a whole lot of advertisers who would be interested in targeted ads on aggregator sites showing live events. As long as Facebook has the permission of its users to aggregate the content partnership with other media could be very fruitful. Digg had an idea to partner with news sites in providing a widget that enabled  access to their vast vault of user generated content.

Very soon the models will be in place and people will be participating in social sites to enact community based commerce.

Students from grade 11 at Balmoral Hall joined alumnae Elizabeth Gage ’78 at the Manitoba Women Entrepreneur of the Year Award’s. Elizabeth was the winner of the Building business and Overall Excellence Award last year and made a speech on what it takes to build a business. The evening was an inspiration for all and especially to the students who were encouraged to think big and work hard to achieve their dream. Also in attendence was Elizabeth’s daughter, Sarah who is in grade 6 at Balmoral Hall.

Mobile Marketing offers an unique opportunity for advertisers to engage consumers in a very personal and targeted way with relevant and timely messages that translate into high conversion rates. Global adoption for this emerging media is experiencing exceptional growth rates. Spain leads Europe with 48% penetration, followed by Italy at 42%, France at 39%, Germany at 27% and the UK at 25%. North America who has been a little behind the curve in December of 2008 announced it had reached penetration rates of 30%.

Whether or not 30% is the Tipping Point, one thing is for certain, and that is that there is a new shift in brand thinking towards mobile marketing. What was once experimental is now essential to the marketing mix. According to Insight Media when integrated into the marketing mix Mobile has demonstrated a campaign lift of anywhere from 3 to 10x (CPMs) and a (CPC) performance of 5x compared to online.

The top categories for mobile spend are: entertainment, mobile downloads, auto, portals, retail and travel. Generally the industry is still young and there is room for many more opportunities – including even Mobile Giving Campaigns.

At a gathering of global thought leaders at the Mobile Conference in New York June 1-4, there was a general consensus that smart phones, and in particular the IPhone, are the devices driving impressions. They have also given rise to another area in mobile, being the area of application branding. According to Juniper Research by 2014 sales of mobile applications will exceed 25 million.

There is no questions that Mobile applications make our lives easier because direct access to our personal content means no WAP browsing which we all have experienced to be a pain from time to time. Application marketers have gotten more marketing savy too. A recent social networking application demonstration for the IPhone showed the application came with a tutorial. (A huge step forward).

The Mobile Channel is where the internet was 10 years ago and this makes it an exciting space to explore. SMS and mobile web are hitting the mainstream in a whole host of creative and technological ways including advances in: IVR, photo recognition, video downloading, and location based coupons. A myriad of innovative mobile technologies can be combined with perfect creative that can be updated, time sensitive, targeted geographically and demographically. Results can be measured through robust analytical tools that report ROI and engagement insights. Today the Mobile Channel can no longer be ignored.