What is the "Verified by VISA"/"MasterCard SecureCode" password?

This is the password that your credit card issuing Bank provides. For example – ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Citibank, HSBC Bank, Axis Bank, SBI etc. This password is the additional layer of security for all your online transactions.

How it Works?Benefits of "Verified by VISA"/"MasterCard SecureCode" password

Even if you lose / misplace your credit card it cannot be misused online as the password is not present on the card.

Note : Keep your password safe. Do not share your password with anyone.

What if you don’t have a mobile phone ?

If you don’t have an mobile phone you cannot able to signup for Gmail account. Instead you may need to ask your friend,s mobile number to receive a code.

Why they made this Feature ?

According to Google this is done as an initiative that to avoid spam and abuse protection.

Is there any limitation for creating Account for a single Phone number

Yes, Each mobile number have a limitation for creating Gmail Account’s. So create Gmail account only when you needed. But they have yet to say the limitation of creating email accounts on a single number.

Update: We can still create a gmail id without mobile verification if we get an invitation from the existing gmail user, But i am not sure how long gmail will accept the invitation registrations.

Potential victims of this scam receive a message like this:

Hey! check out this funny blog about you… jannawalitax . blogspot . com

When you click on that link in that message, you’ll be redirected to some Fake Twitter login page (twitter.access-logins.com) that asks your password. That phishing domain seems to be registered in China.

So, be careful! Keep an eye on the address bar and don’t log into your twitter account through any site other than Twitter.com.

This callout dll allows the administrators to define rules for assigning IP addresses from specific IP address ranges based on the vendor/ user classes of the DHCP clients in the network. The IP address to these DHCP clients will be leased/ renewed based on the rules configured by the administrator. Alternatively, the administrator could also implement a light weight network access control by denying IP addresses based on vendor/ user class of the device.

It can be configured for address assignment based on any one of the below:

* Vendor class identifier (option 60)
* User class identifier (option 77)

This will provide administrator the following advantages:

* Network access control, denial of IP based on vendor/ user class
* Better manageability, as different vendors are assigned IP addresses from different ranges
* Ability to configure options with different values for different DHCP clients, in the same subnet, based on the vendor/ user class.

This callout dll is supported on Windows Server 2008 (Standard or higher, 32 or 64 bit) and above, running DHCP Server (only English builds).

The callout dll can be configured using an MMC snapin. For usage information refer to the setup document present in the zip file attached to the blog.

Download it from DHCP Team blog or click here to download it.

Earlier the dhcpteam blog came up with MAC filtering tool by which we can restrict IP address based on the mac address of the machine.

Overview

DHCP Administrators would like to control access to their networks, by issuing IP addresses to known clients or denying the same to select machines. This functionality may be added to the MS DHCP Server,   by installing this package, thereby adding an additional lightweight layer of security on the network.

This DHCP Server Callout DLL allows the administrator to filter incoming DHCP Requests to DHCP Server based on the MAC Address of the DHCP client.  When a device or computer tries to connect to the network, it shall first try to obtain an IP address from the DHCP Server.    DHCP Server Callout DLL checks if the MAC address of the machine is present in a known list of MAC addresses (, that has been configured by administrators). The client’s request to obtain an IP address or other configuration information (via DHCP),   shall be forwarded or dropped based on the list configured by administrator.

This callout DLL will help user in solving either of the following problems

1.    Allow machines, whose MAC addresses are configured in a list to get an IP address or

2.    Deny IP addresses to machines, whose MAC addresses are configured in a list.

System Requirements

• Server: Windows 2003 Server (Enterprise or higher)/Windows 2008 Server (Enterprise or higher, 32 or 64 bit), running DHCP Server

Usage

1.    Run the appropriate installer depending on your processor architecture, (i.e.,   on a 32 bit Windows Server OS, run <executable1.xxx> or run <executable2.xxx> on 64 bit Server OS)

2.    Edit the file (e.g. MACFilter.txt), per the file format, provided in the section “Mac Address List File Format”.

3.    You can customize the setup, in your environment,    by changing the following registry keys:

MAC Address List File Format

• File should contain action followed by MAC address list as show in below

#MACList.txt

MAC_ACTION = {ALLOW / DENY}

#List of MAC Addresses:

000a0c0d1254     #lab-server1

000d0c4a6723     #lab-server2

…

…

• File supports comments. Comments can be entered following a ‘#’ sign. Any text followed by ‘#’ till the end of line is treated as a comment.
• First line in the file (excluding comments) should specify the action. Action can be either ALLOW or DENY
  • When action is specified as ALLOW, all requests from MAC address present in this list will be served by DHCP servers. All requests originating from MAC address not present in this list will be ignored.
  • When action is specified as DENY, all request from MAC address present in the list will be ignored by DHCP servers. All requests from MAC addresses not present in this list will be severed by DHCP server.
  • Only one action out of ALLOW or DENY can be specified in MAC Address List File
• MAC address should be specified in format XXXXXXXXXXXX (where X can be hex digit 0 – F).There should not any delimiter such as -, : in MAC address. Each MAC address should be specified in separate line.
• If there is any error in MAC Address List File, it will be logged into CalloutErrorLogFile or default error log file. Following is expected behavior of dll in cases of errors
  • If the action is not specified correctly, then DHCP server will function as if there is no callout dll i.e. none of the requests will be ignored.
  • If one or more MAC addresses are not specified correctly, then in this case those MAC address entries will be ignored. Error for the same will be logged in error log file.

The installer does the following:

1.    Places the MAC Filter callout dll in your system32 directory.

2.    Creates \ Modifies following  registry keys at location HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\DHCPServer\Parameters

By default the location for the Error Log, Info Log, MACList is initialized to the location of the DHCP Server audit log at the installation time. These values can be changed through regedit.

3.    Stop DHCP server (if it is already running)

4.    Start DHCP server. When DHCP server is started, event 1033 will be logged if Callout DLL is loaded successfully by DHCP server.

You can download the MacFilterCallout application from MacFilterCallout.zip.

Special thanks to Microsoft Windows DHCP Team Blog for providing this tool

Here are very useful tips for all mysql DBA’s, Developers these tips are noted from MySQL Camp 2006 suggested by mysql community experts.

1. Kaj (Most Excellent Obvious Facilitator) Index stuff.
2. Ronald Don’t Index Everything
3. Use benchmarking
4. Minimize traffic by fetching only what you need.
   1. Paging/chunked data retrieval to limit
   2. Don’t use SELECT *
   3. Be wary of lots of small quick queries if a longer query can be more efficient
5. Use EXPLAIN to profile the query execution plan
6. Use Slow Query Log (always have it on!)
7. Don’t use DISTINCT when you have or could use GROUP BY
8. Use proper data partitions
   1. For Cluster. Start thinking about Cluster *before* you need them
9. Insert performance
   1. Batch INSERT and REPLACE
   2. Use LOAD DATA instead of INSERT
10. LIMIT m,n may not be as fast as it sounds
11. Don’t use ORDER BY RAND() if you have > ~2K records
12. Use SQL_NO_CACHE when you are SELECTing frequently updated data or large sets of data
13. avoid wildcards at the start of LIKE queries
14. avoid correlated subqueries and in select and where clause (try to avoid in)
15. config params -
16. no calculated comparisons – isolate indexed columns
17. innodb_flush_commit=0 can help slave lag
18. ORDER BY and LIMIT work best with equalities and covered indexes
19. isolate workloads don’t let administrative work interfere with customer performance. (ie backups)
20. use optimistic locking, not pessimistic locking. try to use shared lock, not exclusive lock. share mode vs. FOR UPDATE
21. use row-level instead of table-level locking for OLTP workloads
22. Know your storage engines and what performs best for your needs, know that different ones exist.
    1. use MERGE tables ARCHIVE tables for logs
23. Optimize for data types, use consistent data types. Use PROCEDURE ANALYSE() to help determine if you need less
24. separate text/blobs from metadata, don’t put text/blobs in results if you don’t need them
25. if you can, compress text/blobs
26. compress static data
27. don’t back up static data as often
28. derived tables (subqueries in the FROM clause) can be useful for retrieving BLOBs w/out sorting them. (self-join can speed up a query if 1st part finds the IDs and use it to fetch the rest)
29. enable and increase the query and buffer caches if appropriate
30. ALTER TABLE…ORDER BY can take chronological data and re-order it by a different field
31. InnoDB ALWAYS keeps the primary key as part of each index, so do not make the primary key very large, be careful of redundant columns in an index, and this can make the query faster
32. Do not duplicate indexes
33. Utilize different storage engines on master/slave ie, if you need fulltext indexing on a table.
34. BLACKHOLE engine and replication is much faster than FEDERATED tables for things like logs.
35. Design sane query schemas. don’t be afraid of table joins, often they are faster than denormalization
36. Don’t use boolean flags
37. Use a clever key and ORDER BY instead of MAX
38. Keep the database host as clean as possible. Do you really need a windowing system on that server?
39. Utilize the strengths of the OS
40. Hire a MySQL ^TM Certified DBA
41. Know that there are many consulting companies out there that can help, as well as MySQL’s Professional Services.
42. Config variables & tips:
    1. use one of the supplied config files
    2. key_buffer, unix cache (leave some RAM free), per-connection variables, innodb memory variables
    3. be aware of global vs. per-connection variables
    4. check SHOW STATUS and SHOW VARIABLES (GLOBAL|SESSION in 5.0 and up)
    5. be aware of swapping esp. with Linux, “swappiness” (bypass OS filecache for innodb data files, innodb_flush_method=O_DIRECT if possible (this is also OS specific))
    6. defragment tables, rebuild indexes, do table maintenance
    7. If you use innodb_flush_txn_commit=1, use a battery-backed hardware cache write controller
    8. more RAM is good so faster disk speed
    9. use 64-bit architectures
43. Know when to split a complex query and join smaller ones
44. Debugging sucks, testing rocks!
45. Delete small amounts at a time if you can
46. Archive old data – don’t be a pack-rat! 2 common engines for this are ARCHIVE tables and MERGE tables
47. use INET_ATON and INET_NTOA for IP addresses, not char or varchar
48. make it a habit to REVERSE() email addresses, so you can easily search domains
49. -skip-name-resolve
50. increase myisam_sort_buffer_size to optimize large inserts (this is a per-connection variable)
51. look up memory tuning parameter for on-insert caching
52. increase temp table size in a data warehousing environment (default is 32Mb) so it doesn’t write to disk (also constrained by max_heap_table_size, default 16Mb)
53. Normalize first, and denormalize where appropriate.
54. Databases are not spreadsheets, even though Access really really looks like one. Then again, Access isn’t a real database
55. In 5.1 BOOL/BIT NOT NULL type is 1 bit, in previous versions it’s 1 byte.
56. A NULL data type can take more room to store than NOT NULL
57. Choose appropriate character sets & collations – UTF16 will store each character in 2 bytes, whether it needs it or not, latin1 is faster than UTF8.
58. make similar queries consistent so cache is used
59. Have good SQL query standards
60. Don’t use deprecated features
61. Use Triggers wisely
62. Run in SQL_MODE=STRICT to help identify warnings
63. Turning OR on multiple index fields (<5.0) into UNION may speed things up (with LIMIT), after 5.0 the index_merge should pick stuff up.
64. /tmp dir on battery-backed write cache
65. consider battery-backed RAM for innodb logfiles
66. use min_rows and max_rows to specify approximate data size so space can be pre-allocated and reference points can be calculated.
67. as your data grows, indexing may change (cardinality and selectivity change). Structuring may want to change. Make your schema as modular as your code. Make your code able to scale. Plan and embrace change, and get developers to do the same.
68. pare down cron scripts
69. create a test environment
70. try out a few schemas and storage engines in your test environment before picking one.
71. Use HASH indexing for indexing across columns with similar data prefixes
72. Use myisam_pack_keys for int data
73. Don’t use COUNT * on Innodb tables for every search, do it a few times and/or summary tables, or if you need it for the total # of rows, use SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS and SELECT FOUND_ROWS()
74. use -safe-updates for client
75. Redundant data is redundant
76. Use INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY update (INSERT IGNORE) to avoid having to SELECT
77. use groupwise maximum instead of subqueries
78. be able to change your schema without ruining functionality of your code
79. source control schema and config files
80. for LVM innodb backups, restore to a different instance of MySQL so Innodb can roll forward
81. use multi_query if appropriate to reduce round-trips
82. partition appropriately
83. partition your database when you have real data
84. segregate tables/databases that benefit from different configuration variables

Source: MySQL

Prevention: As all us know that “Prevention is better than cure” We must use firewall while using your PC, if you feel using firewall annoys you, then you must use firewall at least while using the internet. You can use windows firewall, but there are many powerful alternative tools available of which some of them were Zone Alarm, Kerio personal firewall, Etrust EZ armor etc ,

Pop ups like “you have critical viruses and spyware in your system, download this software”are used by spyware makers to cheat you and make you download their Malicious software, if a website opens suddenly when you don’t click or install any software or download something from internet, then that is a fake URL just avoid it. When we chat in IM we may get links saying “view sexy pictures” most of such links contain malicious software’s which may again harm your computer.

Cure: there are nice anti spyware software like Spyware Doctor, Ad-Aware etc which can remove spyware. A daily scan using this software must be done in order to protect the computer from spyware. Software like Norton internet security must be used for blocking malicious download and use of Nxleaner or other registry and cookie cleaning software to delete unwanted registries.

The best antivirus i do reccomend is AVG, Click Here to read my article on AVG.

I am personally very much scared with this kind of software’s because they can give you thrilling days when you find out that your personal information is shared with others. You normally store all your website logins, credit card numbers etc on your computer or else on your web browsers and this hijacker software’s would steal all your information and use if it is useful to them financially.

While a normal virus would hit your computer files, these keyloggers would hit everything of yours because they get access to all your data which can be a very bad event. Here are few recommended software’s which you need to install on the pc or laptop to scan out all your hard drive and find out if there are any keyloggers type of software’s installed and remove them. This is one of the best ways you can protect your privacy.

Free Software for Secured Deletion:

Check out File Shredder 2 which is free software to block access to your sensitive information and system files. It removes all the important files from your hard drive in such a manner that recovering them would be a very hard job by the hackers, keeping your computer’s hard drive completely secured.

Paid Privacy Protection Software
Even if you use C Cleaner the free system files cleaning utility, there would be some files still left on your computer which when you need software’s like Webroot Window Washer. It deletes all the unwanted useless files from your computer especially the history files of your web browser. There is an option Window Washer’s One-click Shredder which either deletes a complete folder or a single file instantly with no trails left. More features in this application would include removing or deleting cookies you don’t want to and the cookies you want to continue being stored on your computer. Generally there are cookies stored on your computer through the web browser when you access different websites and some of these can be harmful enough which you need to eradicate asap. You can try out the free trial version initially and later upgrade to the 29.95$ paid version.

Paid Antilogger Software :
This software would take of all your most important components like Keyboard, Hard Drive, Screen by looking for suspicious activity like webcam loggers, screen loggers, SSL loggers, keyboard loggers etc which try to send out information out of your computer connection without your knowledge. There is a 30days free trail during which you can try out all the features of this program and then buy the paid version at 39.50$ if you are satisfied with the application and when you feel you are completely secured.

By default, the application is set to search for new virus definitions daily, but you always can use the scheduling tool to change this. Should a virus create serious system problems, AVG creates a rescue disk to scan your computer in MS-DOS mode. The program doesn’t tax your system when scanning or when running in the background and always proved effective in our tests. The new interface is much easier to navigate than in previous version, with tabbed navigation on the left assisting users in drilling down to the tools they need.

Though the free version of this program will suffice for average folks, those who demand more control should certainly consider AVG Anti-Virus Professional.

Download It Here…

1. First of all, Open your notepad.

2. Now paste the following code in your notepad

X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

3. Now save it as virus.exe (or anyname.exe).

4. If your antivirus detects the virus, it means your antivirus is working otherwise change your antivirus.