Blue Monday After Black Friday?

Posted by Billy Law-Bregan

Shopping

The sales rush is over—for now.

Black Friday saw some record-breaking sales numbers, and some literal battles for bargains. A whopping £810m was spent on Black Friday and an estimated £650m was spent on Cyber Monday.

Several major retailers were flattened by people bargain hunting online. Tesco, Currys, and Argos, to name but a few, experienced significant downtime under the strain of millions of visitors to their sites. Every second that these retailers were down was costing them a fortune in lost revenue.

The painful truth is that if your site can’t cope with traffic at peak time you run the risk of slow pages, abandoned baskets, and worst of all, downtime.  All of which are a huge risks to potential revenue, just ask the big retailers!

To cope with the ever growing demands for eCommerce you need a sound, adaptable infrastructure. Speak to a Reconnix consultant, perhaps we can help you handle your sales peaks and prepare for the January Sales.

Have you experienced any problems with traffic peaks? Let us know, leave a comment below.

Research shows IT firms not ready for the move to IaaS just yet

Posted by Wes Thompson

Recently, Reconnix commissioned a survey that asked 100 IT decision makers for their thoughts on IaaS and migrating applications to the cloud. Gaining interest in the press, the research has highlighted some interesting findings and raised a few eyebrows.

Of those that were asked, a staggering 82% of the IT decision makers said they do not believe they are ready to move to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Worryingly, this seems to be down to the fact that only 7% of the respondents were confident that they had all the skills for managing an IaaS environment in-house. With 59% believing they had some of the skills, no skills, or didn’t know.

However, despite the caution about moving from a traditional server to an IaaS, 88% of the respondents said the transition was high or medium priority.

  • Steve Nice, C.T.O. at Reconnix, comments,

  • There’s a very clear desire for businesses to move applications away from traditional environments and towards Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers, however a lack of adequate skills seem to be holding back many IT departments from making this move.

  • However, Nice warns, having a conservative approach to IaaS means that many businesses could be missing out on the benefits. And, what’s more, businesses could be at a technological disadvantage.
  • Interestingly, 32% of the respondents declared that the biggest motivating factor for moving toward IaaS was cost saving. And 54% believe that cost is the biggest factor to consider when making buying decision about IaaS. Nice argues that making a decision on an IaaS migration based solely on cost is risky.

  • Often a cloud provider is only as good as the service level agreement (SLA) in place and, by cutting costs, poor support and periods of downtime are more likely.

For more information on the Reconnix survey, see the infographic below.

Download as a Large PDF (For Print)
Download a smaller one for web use.


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Have we found a bug in Mailchimp?

Posted by Billy Law-Bregan

Late yesterday afternoon (24/11/14), Reconnix became aware of a vulnerability within WordPress. The problem is with a cross-site scripting vulnerability that affects versions 3.9.2 and earlier. This particular vulnerability could allow an attacker to enter code on to the comments section of a blog post, enabling them to take control of the administrator’s account.

So, as with all security alerts, we generated and released a newsletter via MailChimp, alerting all our clients of this vulnerability. However, we had some new clients that had not yet gone through MailChimp’s opt-in procedure to be on our mailing list. So, in order for them to see our alert, we sent them a link via MailChimp’s social share option.

However, this is where we spotted a problem. When we shared the link for the alert, we noticed that the snippet generated gave information to another alert that we raised on the 8th August 2014. Below are a series of screenshots that show our particular dilemma.

  1. 1. This is the alert newsletter that we generated yesterday (24/11/14) on MailChimp:
Screenshot from 2014-11-25 11:16:41

2. This is a screenshot from MailChimp’s social share page. The page generates a link to the campaign that you want to share. In this image, you can see the link that MailChimp generated (http://eepurl.com/9gSTj) for the WordPress Vulnerability alert that we created yesterday (24/11/14):

MailChimp Share

3. However, when we pasted the link (http://eepurl.com/9gSTj) into a social media site, the snippet generated was that of a previous Drupal and WordPress vulnerability alert:

MailChimp Slack

4. This is the alert to which the snippet is referring. Notice that the date of this particular release was 8th August 2014:

MailChimp Alert in August

Interestingly, when you clicked on the link that MailChimp generated, it took you to the correct landing page.

So what? Well, from our point-of-view, this could be a potential problem. If our clients saw the link and the generated snippet, they may assume that they have already received this information and miss out on vital security information. Not only could this pose a potential security risk for our clients, it could also lead to our customers losing confidence in our services. We need to get this monkey off our backs.

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