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May 2021

TCP IP
cPanel & WHM, Linux, VPS, Web Hosting

Common Protocols and Their Port Numbers

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Service names and port numbers are utilized to differentiate between services used over transport protocols such as TCP/IP, UDP and SCTP. The organization responsible for assigning the name and port number of the services is called Internet Assigned Numbers Authority or IANA for short who also maintains the registries where service names and port numbers are stored. Port registries used in transport protocols are divided into three ranges: 1-System Ports (0-1023) 2-User Ports (1024-49151) 3-Dynamic / Private Ports (49152-65535)   For service to operate efficiently, hosts that operate them and access them along with intermediate devices, like firewalls, must agree on which service is used on which port and many services will use the port listed on the IANA registry. However, with the growing use of windows and single-user Linux systems over the years, the initial port model isn’t strictly adhered to, which means It may no longer be presumed that a particular port number automatically refers to a specific service. For example, web hosts launch multiple instances of the same service, so we cannot use the same port for all. Nowadays there are hundreds and hundreds of programs and application-level protocols that have been delegated service names and port numbers along with this amount is set to increase later on. Additional confusion above port numbers may appear since IANA may de-assign a few more in usage and reassign it to a different service. Here’s a table of the most common services and their port numbers Service name   Port number FTP 20,21 SSH 22 TELNET 23 SMTP 25 DNS 53 DHCP 67,68 HTTP 80 HTTPS 443 POP3 110 IMAP4 143   On Linux machines, you can find information about the services that client applications might use in the /etc/services folder. On windows, services, port number and protocols are in the C:windows\system32\drivers\etc\services   Conclusion Dealing with services and port numbers can be messy, but you know what’s not messy? Hostilica shared hosting services. With Hostilica’s SSD server, 99.9% uptime guarantee, and qualified customer support, you can be sure that hosting your website will go as smoothly as possible. Check out our shared hosting offers here.

Website Cookies
Web Development

What Are Web Cookies?

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Web cookies are usually compact text files, given ID tags that are saved on your computer’s browser directory or program information subfolders. Cookies are made when you use your browser to visit a website that uses cookies to keep track of your moves within the website, enable you to restart where you left off, remember your registered login, subject choice, preferences, and other customization purposes. The Web Site stores a corresponding document (with the same ID label )to the one they set in your browser,and in this file they can monitor and store information on your moves within the site and any information You Might Have willingly given while visiting the website Cookies are often portrayed as the devil responsible for the fall of privacy, and the sole reason for their existence is to take your data, but that’s actually far from the truth. You should know that without cookies, you could kiss the internet as you know it goodbye. Cookies are responsible for a lot of the functions you need on the internet, such as keeping you logged in (so you wouldn’t have to log in each time you visit a page and it’s also responsible for the shopping cart in e-commerce websites. Let us explain why. Cookie types: The cookies that you hear about all the time are called HTTP cookies and the are two types of them: The first type is called session cookies. Session cookies are as harmless as cookies can be. As the name suggests, Session cookies work only while you’re on the website and disappear as soon as you close it and the data along with it. The second type of cookies is called persistent cookies and these are the ones that stir up all the controversy. The first type of problem with this cookie is that it can stay indefinitely on your browser (however, most of them clear after two weeks). This type of cookie is the one responsible for personally identifying you and collecting data about you such as your browsing patterns. We know this sounds bad; however, a lot of good comes from this type of cookie because, as a rule of thumb, the better a company knows about you, the better they can serve. The problem here comes with collect way too much data than they should or sell your data to other companies; of course not to forget third party cookies, which literally tracks you all over the web   Conclusion Cookies are not inherently evil or a lousy invention, but many companies abused them, but that doesn’t mean that we should blame the cookies. If you like this article, you might also want to check out our article on APIs

DDoS attack
Security, Web Hosting

What is a DDOS Attack?

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In computer networking, a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) is an attack in which the attacker seeks to render a specific system or network resource temporarily or permanently unavailable to its victims. Distributed denial of service attacks are performed by attackers that control multiple victim systems. Unlike traditional types of Internet attacks, where an IP address identifies a single system or computer, the underlying principle of DDoS is that an Internet user can bring down or damage several systems simultaneously from different computers that have different IPs. This makes it impossible for a system to relay information during such an attack accurately.   Distributed denial-of-service is one of the most formidable forms of cyberattacks, and it can wreak havoc on your business. If you have a server used for your company’s online operation, then a distributed attack against it can bring down many of its important services. With a single DDoS attack, you can get pretty much anything on the Internet to go down.  How does it work? A DDOS attack is carried out by a network of devices that can range from PCs to IoT devices that have been infected by a malware that allows the attacker to control them. The attacker then orders these devices to send many requests, causing a server to be overwhelmed by the number of requests. Of course, there are many variations of this attack, but they all share the basic concept of overwhelming a web server.   How to identify a DDOS attack? The most obvious indicator is a site or a service slowing down or shutting down completely. However, many reasons can cause these issues, such as legitimate traffic spikes, so you should do some extra investigation. Here are some of the signs you should look for while investigating: A big amount of traffic originating from a single IP or a range of IP addresses A lot of traffic from users with the same behaviour Unexplained requests for a single page Spike patterns at odd times.   How To Deal With DDOS Attacks? As we mentioned above, always try to locate the IP addresses responsible for the attack and block them; however, this won’t be possible in some situations, so here are some steps you can take to mitigate the damage. software packages in your web server such as mod_reqtimeout that ships with apache can help to defend against DDOS attacks Increase server power Use Load balancers to balance the DDOS load on multiple servers Setup a firewall application Consider hiring a DDOS mitigation service such as Cloudflare. If you want to learn more about security threats and how to protect your website against them check out these articles

What is a Brute Force Attack
Linux, Security

What is a Brute Force Attack?

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You may have heard the term “brute force” when looking for information on hacking, but you may not understand what it means. It’s a common term that is often used in the security world. Basically, the attacker submits many passwords either through a dictionary(password list) or auto-generated passphrases until the computer guesses the correct combination, like trying out all the possible combinations on a safe. This attack requires minimal effort on the attacker’s part since modern computers can crack an eight-alphanumeric complex password in less than two hours. It can even take less time if your password is found in a recycled dictionary (credentials got from another breach). The most known password dictionary is rockyou which contains 14,341,564 passwords to date. Brute Force attacks can be very problematic because once an attacker is in, it is tough to catch them, so most people try to protect their websites before the attack happens or detect and neutralize the attacker while the attack is happening. How to protect yourself? Protecting your website and credentials against Brute Force attacks isn’t hard. You just need to know the best practices:   Use Complex Passwords: Using complex passwords makes it much harder for a computer to crack your password. Always make sure to include special characters such @,_ and !. You can always use cPanel included password generator to generate strong and complex passwords for you.   Increase Password Length: Just using a complex password won’t completely protect you. As we mentioned above, a modern computer can crack eight-alphanumeric complex passwords in about two hours, so make sure to increase the length of your password.   Limit Login Attempts: Limiting login attempts on your website will make it almost impossible for your password to be cracked, so if you can enable it on your website dashboard, you should.   Use Two-Factor Authentication: Two-factor authentication adds a second security layer to your credentials by sending an OTP (one time) passcode to your phone number or email so that even if your password is compromised, the attacker won’t be able to access the app unless they get the OTP code.   Implementing Captcha: Implementing captcha on your website is a great way to make sure that whoever is trying to access your website is a human, not a bot.   Conclusion Brute force attacks can cause massive problems since they are very hard to notice if they are successful; however, preventing them is relatively easy if you follow the practices above. Never take your website or credentials security lightly, and always make sure that your website is secure as possible.

What are DNS records
Web Hosting

DNS Records and Types

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As we mentioned before in the DNS explained article, the domain name system is what makes up the internet as we know it. The domain name system translates the human-friendly URLs that we can read, write, and memorize into IP addresses that connect to websites that we use. If you plan to run your own website, you will definitely need to understand DNS records and how to use them properly. So what is a DNS record? DNS records contain that data to answer a client’s query; they are simply the database that holds the information about the servers IP addresses. Depending on their type, this will determine the data returned to the client and what they can do with it. Let’s explain the most common DNS records you will need to use.   Name server record: More commonly known as NS records. The name server record indicates which DNS server actually holds the DNS records for a domain. It basically tells the internet where to find the IP addresses to a website or an application. Most hosting providers will provide you with two NS records. A primary record and a secondary one in case the primary server fails. NS record is an essential service for every registrar or hosting provider and you will have to change them when you change your hosting provider.   A and AAAA record: An A record is short for address record and is basically used to point a domain or a subdomain to an IPv4 server’s IP address. For example, if you have a website that consists of a store and blog and wants to host them on two separate servers, you can use two separate A records by setting, for example, blog.example.com to a shop.example.com to another server’s IP address. You can also set this record in order to indicate the IP address for your mail subdomain. AAAA records are used the same as A records but are used to route IPv6 addresses. It is worth noting that both A and AAAA accept only IP addresses as values.   CNAME record: The CNAME record is short for canonical name record and is used to set a domain or a subdomain as an alias to another domain. A very common use case for this record would be setting domain names to resolve to the same IP addresses with or without WWW. CNAME records always take host names as a value not an IP address.   MX entry: Mail exchanger entry is used to direct emails to email servers. MX entries differ from A and CNAME records in that they take priority as a value so you can prioritize servers, and records will attempt to use the highest priority server first (higher priority numbers are used first). Like CNAME entries, MX entries must be to a domain or a subdomain not an IP address, so you will have to set the A records for the domain first.   TXT records: A TXT (text) record is used to store text data that was first used to store human readable text. Nowadays, they are used for verification such as Google verification to verify for Google that you own a certain domain or verify that emails are coming from trusted sources.   Conclusion Managing DNS can be tricky in the beginning, especially if you don’t know what each record is used for and for the most your hosting provider will handle it, but for more advanced use cases, you will need to do it yourself, so we hope you have a better idea of how each DNS record is used by now.

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