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Ok, maybe hate is too strong of word, despise is more like it. I despise hackers about as much as I despise spammers. Lately, almost every day, I’m either fighting off a hacker who wants to play havoc with one of my domains or a spammer that wants to fill my inbox with bogus requests from one of my online forms.

Normal spammers don’t bother me much, as my spam filter catches those and they go bye bye real fast. The spammers that use bots to automatically fill out online forms are really starting to get my fluff up.

Thanks to Patti Serrano and her ever watching eyes, she caught a hacker on one of my sites, shortly after the attempt was made. She alerted me via Twitter Direct Message (another reason I love Twitter) about this and I immediately stopped what I was doing and thwarted their attempts.

In this particular case, the hackers were not malicious, just having a little fun exploiting a security flaw in my online shopping cart. It took me about 10 minutes to identify the flaw and seal the hole and get my site back online again.

Now, the spammers had to be dealt with. Since the site they were hitting is not programmed in PHP, I couldn’t use something elaborate as Captcha, so instead, I sit down and wrote my own routines within the form submission program I am using (sort of like Captcha, but not as sophisticated) and then I tested this new setup and it appears that this will stop the spammers (for now at least).

Like anything else that is working right, hackers and spammers are a way of life for an online presence. These ever present thorns in our back sides won’t go away very soon. Take my advice, especially if you have multiple web sites and domains, check them frequently for hacking attempts and get your sites fixed right away or else it could cost you customers, visitors and most importantly, your reputation.

Oh, one more thing to remember, if you have ANYTHING that requires a login and password, DON’T just set this to the default or turn it off so that it is easier for you to get in. If it’s easy for you to get in, it’s easy for EVERYONE to get in!

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There are a number of online resources that can help you find credit information and can help you with your credit repair project:

The FICO web site – www.myfico.com – contains lots of useful credit repair information and even allows you to order credit reports and scores.
The credit bureaus (transunion.com, equifax.com and experian.com) allow you to order credit scores and credit reports online.

Through the online sites you can also get information on reporting errors on your credit report. Your bank likely offers online banking as well, which can make managing your accounts easier and simpler for you each month.

Most companies – including utility companies and credit card companies – will now allow you to get your bills right in your inbox. This is a very handy feature as it allows you to get your bill right away, it cuts down on the amount of mail you get, and allows you to get and pay your bill online through online banking. Plus, many accounting software packages now allow you to coordinate all your financial information through one program, which can make taking care of your finances much more automatic and timely.

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