Wired.com was the first major news group to write a story on and it blew up from there. On that single day it spread to numerous sites in the United States such as CNN, Slashdot, MSNBC, and GCN. I expected the story to go big because of the wide implication and impact of the issue of Doppelganger Domains, but what happened next was a pleasant surprise. The story went international and spread to the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, India, Russia, China, Canada, and many other areas! And from there radio and print wanted to run a story as well which was quite a fun experience to interview with them and get the research out to another set of audience. This whole experience was great, and I’m thankful to all the various media outlets that carried the story. I hope that businesses take it seriously and take action.

For now, I want to get back to producing and hold off on putting on the PR hat again for a little bit.

I really needed something to just show me the interesting things to focus on. Since I had all the nessus data in a database already via nbe2sql, I quickly wrote some sql statements and parsers to solve my problem and make a pretty report.

The latest release of the nessus tools has two more html reports.

• One script is called report_auto which generates html that contain findings to simply write up. For each vulnerability type there is a table with IP and supporting information columns. 
• The other script is called report_manual which generates html that contain findings or information to pursue.

Do note that only a handful of nessus pluginid’s are supported in the script. If you want other checks included please provide me with some sample data and I will get it included.

Code:

• nessus_tools-1.2-src.zip (Python source code)
• nessus_tools-1.2-win32-bin.zip (Windows binaries)

I do hope that others find these additions useful. I really hate it when testers have to spend time on low level findings. Yes they still need to be looked at and written up, but testers should be focusing on the interesting stuff.

• Attended 26 events – a combination of conferences, workshops, and training classes.
• Launched another startup.
• Built several applications that are in use by many today.
• Last year’s startup is gaining more traction.
• Traveled 12 times, being on the road for 46 days.

Hopefully next year will be just as productive, with less time on the road. Thanks to all that helped and supported me through all my various projects.

I can’t say much on the technical details, but here are a few interesting online resources.

• ipmap / IPv4 ipmap / IPv4 Heatmaps – Hilbert Curve viz for IP
• ourmon – Network monitoring system
• Emerging Threats – Public blacklist
• Malware Domain Blocklist
• Gulp – Full GigE packet logger for linux with no patches required
• Click Scientific – Online tool to determine if a typo domain is registered

Overall…I love the format of the conference, and many of the speakers were leaders in their field. But because of the amount of speakers in a 2 day span, I often felt that they could have provided more information, and answer more questions if given more time. I hope I get invited back next year, and they don’t freak out when they see my camera again :)

Paul Bourque and John Chow both have good overall Affiliate Summit summaries too.

I usually attend technical trade shows and conferences, so I was expecting a similar environment when going to the Affiliate Summit. Was I wrong in that one! I was amazed when I hit the exhibitors hall to see so many booth babes and everyone giving out free stuff.

And I didn’t get to any of the bigger SWAG items like a snowboard, skateboard, or RC car because I didn’t want to lug it back home. But even of the smaller SWAG items I got, they were of good quality. Why isn’t it like this in computer security industry? RSA is coming up, so we will see.

• Truncated rss feeds
• Protection from scrapers
• Given content is 500 words, 50-100 words excerpt is sweet spot
• Get a free SES pass so you can visit the Googleplex at night
• Video does not help in making conversation, just traffic

Super Affiliate Strategies that Work

• John Chow’s website started in Sept 2006, and 12 months later he makes 12k/month. Now he makes 30k/month.
• Amit – Selectively find a niche and build a site around it for the long term.
• Amit – PPC Landing pages – Only links are on the bottom in 10pt font, top has none.
• A keyword is a problem the person has, and the landing page is the solution. Describe and provide value.
• Trademarked terms – Lots of restriction on using them already.
• John Chow’s method of countering scrapers is to put ads on there so he still makes money from them.
• Amit – build a system so even if they scraped, they could only make a tiny percentage of what he normally makes.
• Make a little money from a bunch of small sites, and it all adds up
• Tons of money in social networks
• Amit – Best conversion rate – msn, yahoo, THEN google.
• For him, the target demographics is in msn.
• Google is more savvy users than msn/yahoo
• Amit – MSN has their own content network
• Not a lot of traffic, but good conversions.
• Amit – Sweet spot on google ads is positions 3 and 5.
• Each ad needs to be optimized for the position its in.
• Winneralert – a/b test – delete your loosing ad and create a new winner
• Efficient PPC
• AdWords Editor
• Date parting on ads
• Determine what days work and done
• Lower costs on dead times, max later

Tris and J. Botter both gave good recaps of this panel as well.

Keynote

First off was Jim Kukral MC’ing the event, and then Jason Calacanis had his keynote. His keynote generated a lot of controversy, as he basically said everyone in the room is a spammer. Some other takeaways from his keynote were to build quality sites for the long term, that you shouldn’t settle for $300k checks, and to reach for the stars. Gary Lee posted his thoughts on the keynote, and even Jason Calacanis has some post-keynote thoughts. You can listen to the keynote yourself at Webmaster Radio.

Update: Amit Mehta posted his thoughts on Jason’s keynote.

How to Futureproof Your SEO Efforts

Here are my notes from Wil Reynolds talk on SEO.

• Meta tags
  • Keywords aren’t useful to Google and others anymore
    • He doesn’t even use them
    • But a reason to keep them is for Google adsense
  • Use sentences in the description tag
• Build up your asset inventory
  • Some will strike out, but some will catch on
• Don’t chase Google
• Watch out for Google co-op and widgets
• How-to videos are the best

Moniker’s Live Domain Auctions

This was my first time at a domain auction, and it was quite interesting. There was a nice bidding war between a guy in the room and someone on the internet bidding for chinesenoodles.com. I think it ended up selling for $4,750. But the most expensive domain sold was temp.com to someone in the room for $400,000! And most of the people bidding didn’t seem to care how much they were paying too! I guess I have a lot to learn about the domaining game.

Deal Site Meetup

I organized a meetup for people that ran a deal site and was in Vegas for the Affiliate Summit. We had a good turnout, with Alan from dealtaker.com, Jeff and associate from dealnews.com, Ben from bensbargains.net, Barry from dealhunting.com, and of course me from dealoco.com. And had I known Danielle was with pinkdeals.net, I would have invited her as well (she is totally cute too).

We ended up eating at Tao, as we deemed it easier to just walk upstairs to the Affiliate Bash party right after. It was great to meet everyone, and I hope we can keep the communication lines open, and get together more often. Perhaps ad:tech?

Affiliate Bash at Tao

This was the only party open to everyone at Affiliate Summit, and it was a good party. The Blue Man Group did a special performance there to kick off their new affiliate program. There were a few recaps of this event from John Chow and Zac Johnson. Here is the video I took from their performance.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Overall

One good long day filled with people to see, sessions to attend, and free drinks at night. Gary Lee posted a summary of his day 1 events.

However, my trip to Las Vegas didn’t start off well as my flight was rain delayed, so I missed the Meet Market and the ShareASale party at the Palms. But John Chow took video and gave a tour of the suite so I feel a little bit better on that subject.

We had a great turnout, with about 35 people attending, and I hope everyone enjoyed the talks as much as I did. For those that weren’t able to make it, Kurt Grutzmacher’s presentation was called ‘Your Client-Side Security Suck. Stop Using It.‘ and Eric Rachner’s presentation was on NTLM attacks and countermeasures.

I did record both presentations, but I am having a hard time re-encoding it to fit within youtube’s file size limits. Anyone have ideas on how to squeeze a 40 minute presentation down to under 100mb? My current settings are output to XViD, 320×240, 528kps video, 32kpbs audio. I am going to guess that if I reduce the video bit quality, I can reduce the file size some more, but what is is a good setting? I can’t seem to find any docs or howtos on this.