Advertlets Security Update: Is Advertlets.com Secure? Hell yeah!

In creating Advertlets, a system to make money through your blog, we were aware that there are definite data privacy and security concerns, especially when it comes to trusting a third party to keep your personal details and password safe. Well, some bloggers did too – and one even went as far as to invite tech savvy members of the public to test the security of our system, and try to exploit any vulnerabilities they might find.

We did not expect this to happen – however, we and our system were not unprepared.

We first heard of the news through our RSS feeds, and 1 phone call from a friend. So, 2 members of the team stayed awake throughout the night to watch what people would do, and react as if needed. We kept track of what was happening – about 16 dummy accounts were created on the system from unique IPs, our hits rose drastically, and intrusions were detected from Malaysia, Indonesia & Singapore.

From our logs, we could see as various methods were tried: SQL injection, brute force attacks, URL guessing, and social engineering. The last method was a rather interesting, if futile attempt – someone pretended to be one of our more popular bloggers and requested us to reset their password, apparently having forgotten it. The e-mail header was spoofed to make it seem like it was a actual e-mail of that particular blogger, but we noticed that the reply-to address was another address entirely. To be sure, we checked with the blogger in question, and found that it wasn’t an actual request.

In summary, throughout all the intrusion attempts, no intruder got to do anything further than creating a few fake accounts on our system, which were easily cleared. Our current security system has now been proven effective in a trial by fire – so yes, Advertlets.com is indeed secure, and we can vouch for the protection of your data and password. However, we will leave no stone unturned in our quest to take Advertlets further, and look forward to rolling out additional revenue and security features for our users, especially as our user base grows and we get more popular. Do let us know if you have any further questions, and thanks for your support!