Between then and now they decided to kill the time by launching and incredible giveaway that’s completely free to join!

One lucky winner will receive a brand new iMac Pro worth over $5,000.

Check details on their website.

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Two of these vulnerabilities were found in the WP Fastest Cache plugin and the third one on the Caldera Forms plugin.

Local File Inclusion Vulnerability Severity 4.2 (Medium) and Unauthorized Options Update Vulnerability Severity 4.4 (Medium) in WP Fastest Cache

Wordfence Security Researcher Panagiotis Vagenas discovered both of these vulnerabilities in the WP Fastest Cache plugin which they reported to the author yesterday. The Local File Inclusion vulnerability allows an attacker to execute code on the target web server or on a site visitor’s browser. This enables the attacker to steal or manipulate data, perform a denial of service attack or enable additional attack types such as Cross Site Scripting. Nevertheless any website using Wordfence Firewall, were provided protection against this type of attack prior to discovery.

The Options Update vulnerability allows an attacker to access and make changes to the CDN (Content Delivery Network) options for the website. With this control an attacker can direct all requests for css files, images, videos, etc. to their site, allowing them to serve malicious content to visitors of the vulnerable site.

What to do?

The author released a fix within an hour after Wordfence notified him of the vulnerability. If you are using WP Fastest Cache plugin on your website update it asap.

Sensitive Data Exposure Vulnerability Severity 4.3 (Medium) in Caldera Forms

Wordfence Security Researcher Panagiotis Vagenas also discovered this vulnerability, which reported to the Caldera Forms author yesterday alsp. This vulnerability allows an attacker to gain access to potentially sensitive data that has been captured by a Caldera Form.

What to do?

The author released a fix within hours of discovery and published a blog post about it. If you are using this Caldera Forms plugin on your website update it asap.

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According to Matt McGee’s Search Engine Land article, there would be only two exceptions to this rule: Product Listing Ad (PLA) boxes and ads in the Knowledge Panel.

Barry Schwartz reported yesterday in Search Engine Roundtable that the move away from sidebar ads is leading to four ads at the top of search engine results, the news of which triggered a frenzy of comments regarding the impact of such a change on small businesses and Google’s income.

Rank Ranger’s Google SERP Features Search Intelligence confirmed early this morning that there are now ZERO ads to the side of Google search engine results anywhere in the world.

ZERO Sidebar Ads in Google SERPs

Trending SERP Features

Monitoring changes in organic indicators, knowledge graph features, page one extras and organic results count on a 500k dataset in addition to zero sidebar ads, it is noticeable an increase in bottom of the SERP ads in Google.

Trending SERP Features in Google USA results on February 23, 2016

Change in Google Page One Ads Distribution

Research indicates that Google’s ad placement tests between last week and today’s update resulted in a dramatic change in the display of AdWords advertisements.

Google’s Testing of Sidebar Ads

Looking back over the past 4 weeks, sidebar ads peaked on February 15th with the percentage of Page One search queries resulting in sidebar ads at 55.56% compared to 53.88% on January 25th and 0% today.

AdWords occurrence statistics from January 25 to February 23, 2016 indicate the percentage of Google search queries resulting in each ad location

Impact on AdWords Advertisers

The removal of sidebar ads does not necessarily mean that there will always be four ads above the organic results. There will be cases where only one ad displays for certain queries.  As many marketers have speculated, there is certainly a case for potential higher CPC when there are only 4 ads at the top and none in the sidebar. It will be interesting to see what Google fills all that empty white space with, perhaps more or different types of knowledge panels and product listing ads – which may improve the user experience. We will continue tracking the organic vs. paid clicks and do our best to provide you with helpful insights. We are interested in your feedback regarding the impact (if any) that this AdWords change has on your marketing campaigns – please comment below or contact us.

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One of the things that Wordfence monitors is the number of brute force attacks on WordPress websites. Brute force attacks are password guessing attacks, where an attacker tries to sign in as you by guessing your password.

To give you an idea of the level of attacks in the wild, they gathered data on brute force attacks across the sites Wordfence protects within a 16 hour window starting Sunday until Monday (14^th to 15^th) at 2pm Pacific time.

During that time (only 16 hours) there were a total of 6,611,909 attacks targeting 72,532 individual websites, from 8,941 unique IP addresses and the average number of attacks per victim website was 6.26.

What can you do to protect yourself?

Firstly, make sure you’re running a security network plugin on your WordPress installation.

I use the free version of Wordfence, please make sure that you have the “Wordfence security network” feature enabled.  It is enabled out of the box and if you get a failed login from an IP address, Wordfence will contact their cloud services to find out if that IP is one of the known attackers. If it is, it will immediately be blocked from signing in, protecting your site from a brute force attack. The attacker won’t even get the standard 3 or 5 tries before they get locked out.

Go Deep on Password Security

Password security is a big subject and to fully understand why strong passwords are important and how attackers target weak passwords, you need to gain an understanding of hashing, password salts and attack methods like rainbow tables, how salts work and why modern GPU’s give attackers a huge advantage.

Wordfence has created a comprehensive lesson that explains all of this and much more, including emerging improvements in password algorithms. The lesson is designed to be a place that teachers and university professors can send their students to get a primer on password security and password authentication.

If you want to read the full article please visit Worfence article.

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Was Google replacing the Keyword Tool a good move?

Google announced back in May that it was combing Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator into a new tool called Keyword Planner.

“Behind every successful AdWords campaign are well planned out keywords and ad groups,” said AdWords product manager Deepti Bhatnagar at the time. “In the past, you may have relied on tools like the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator to identify new keywords and ad groups, get traffic estimates, and choose competitive bids and budgets. Over time however, we’ve heard from you that having two tools for search campaign building was cumbersome.”

“We’re constantly working to simplify the process of building campaigns, and today we’re happy to announce the launch of a new tool, Keyword Planner, which combines the functionality of the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator into a smooth, integrated workflow,” Bhatnagar added. “You can use Keyword Planner to find new keyword and ad group ideas, get performance estimates for them to find the bid and budget that are right for you, and then add them to your campaigns.”

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