At 5:46AM the morning of May 19, 2010 I received an email from a client’s Gmail address (the address used in from/senders). The contents of the email tipped me off that it was probably the result of an earlier Gmail phishing attack (and that my client was not in fact shopping at snnsn.com).

I did a little research and did note that Google was the victim of at least 2 well publicized phishing attacks in 2009:

One in October:

• Google confirms Gmail phishing attack

And another Phishing attack earlier in the year in February:

• Gmail phishing attack hits on heels of outage

Below is the subject and body of the email:

Subject: A gift!!!

My friend sent me a digital camera a few days ago,which he bought at a online shop,and I am using the camera right now,I find it is original and really has superior quality,and the price is absolutely competitive in the market,he told me the company website<www.snnsn.com>,  I find they have a full range of products,and there are a great many members there,You can spare some time to log on their web to have a check,there must be something that interests you!

One interesting aspect of this email from the Gmail phishing attack was that they chunked off a couple of my client’s contacts covering first names starting with only 2 letters (in this case d through e). Below was my immediate reply to my client in response to this spam email:

At the moment I can’t find much more than this initial report (for this particular spam mail). If this looks like emails from your gmail account contacts then you’re account has been compromised (there’s been a few reports of phishing attacks on Gmail from 2009). You’ll want to change your password with one that’s at least 8 characters, a combination of letters and numbers, at least one uppercase and a special character.

After a bit more research I found a nice post in the Google support forums aptly named, “Help, spam has been sent to all of my contacts from my gmail account! How do I report this?”.

The most popular answer contained the following important tips:

If your account has been compromised/hacked/stolen you will need to check and fix at least all of the following settings.

But first you need to check the bottom of the Inbox and make sure your account is not open at any other locations.  If it shows additional locations, open the Details window and “Sign out all other sessions”.

Account Security:
Settings -> Accounts and Import -> Google Account Settings -> Change Password [pick a new secure password]
Settings -> Accounts and Import -> Google Account Settings -> Change Password Recovery Options [verify secret question, SMS and recovery e-mail address]

Potential Spam:
Settings -> General -> Signature [make sure nothing as been added]
Settings -> General -> Vacation Responder [make sure it's disabled and empty]

E-mail Theft
Settings -> Accounts and Import -> Send Mail As [make sure it is using your correct e-mail address]
Settings -> Filters [no filters that forward or delete e-mail]
Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP -> Forwarding [disabled or correct address]
Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP -> POP Download [disabled]
Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP -> IMAP Access [disabled]

In that same post there are an additional number of links referencing valuable information on how to harden your Google Gmail account and hopefully prevent or at least mitigate any future damage from these Gmail Phishing attacks.

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There are many out there who believe Google Analytics does not provide hourly reporting in their traffic reports. The main question is if Google Analytics provides hourly statistics or traffic reports broken down by hour for a particular day.

With the help of an existing post from Get Satisfaction titled, “In Google Analytics is there any way to view traffic by time-of-day?“, I can show a Google Analytics view that provides an hourly report for your visits by the day.

The post I referenced provides a screen shot of the Analytics screen under Visitor Trending and Time On Site in which there is a link set titled View By: Daily | Hourly. This is no longer in the Google Analytics UI as mentioned by a commenter in that same post.

The best method to view visitors by hour with Google Analytics is to do the following:

=> select Visitors
=> select Vistor Trending
=> select Visits
=> select Clock/Hourly icon (to the right under the date selection option)

Here is a screen-shot showing visits broken down by hour for May 14:

If your report covers multiple days the hourly report will show the total amount of visitors per day for the date range. If the date range covers only one day the report will show visitors per hour for that particular day.

That’s it. That is how you can view visits and traffic by hour using Google Analytics.

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Here’s a list of 11 interesting links I found browsing the Web this week. I send them to myself over multiple formats throughout the week and towards the end of each (April 14th) try and record them in these blog posts.

Take a look below and I hope you find them as interesting as I did:

• Google Adds App Store for Analytics
• Define Competitors: Step 4 of the 8-Step SEO Strategy
• 11 Excellent Solutions for Making Your Website Mobile Friendly
• zRSSFeed – RSS Feeds Reader for jQuery
• Sponsored Tweets – Twitter Advertising
• WordPress API
• GroupTweet – Turns Twitter Into a Communications Hub
• 9 Useful PHP Functions and Features You Need to Know | Nettuts+
• 5 Free Services for Pre-Scheduling Your Twitter Updates
• 16 Different Clones You Can Build with Drupal
• CSS3 Gradient Buttons

That’s my list of 11 interesting links I found on the internet this week.

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Engadget snapped a few photos and was able to handle a prototype of Nokia’s N8 in London recently, which will be hitting shelves Q3 of this year loaded with Symbian 3. Below is a photo of the Nokia N8 as well as a few observations from Engadget:

The anodized aluminum shell feels very well built and is remarkably light. So much so that our first instinct was to ask whether the battery was inside or this was just a hollow mockup. We’d compare it to the feeling of picking up the Zune HD for the first time, it’s a strikingly light device. Plopping it into our pocket also felt extremely natural, which might be attributable to the particular curvature of the N8’s sides.

Please be sure to read the full post at Engadget for the the Nokia N8 Hands-On.

Cellphones, Mobile Handsets

Nokia N8 hands-on

By Vladislav Savov posted May 11th 2010 7:05AM

Hands-On

128diggsdiggGood old London, full of little wonders and flagship devices for you to discover. We were at Nokia’s local HQ this morning to talk to the company’s Head of Design Marko Ahtisaari, and the good gent happened to bring with him a prototype N8 for us to play around with. It was stressed to us that it’s a prototype, so small cosmetic changes might still occur, but we are for most part looking at the hardware that will be hitting retail shelves in Q3 of this year. Speaking of Q3, Marko was adamant that that will be when Nokia “turns on” the Symbian 3 housed within the N8, which — disappointingly — meant that we couldn’t get to grips with the new UI experience in person. Ah well, there are plenty of pictures to be devoured in the gallery below, and we can provide you with a few observations of our own to tide you over till then.

The anodized aluminum shell feels very well built and is remarkably light. So much so that our first instinct was to ask whether the battery was inside or this was just a hollow mockup. We’d compare it to the feeling of picking up the Zune HD for the first time, it’s a strikingly light device. Plopping it into our pocket also felt extremely natural, which might be attributable to the particular curvature of the N8’s sides.

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Sometimes I don’t even know why these guys bother.

Faviit lets you perform the same search on multiple search engines from a single page, thus saving you from the frustration of opening multiple browser tabs and typing the same words again and again.

You can check it out by going to Favitt.

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The Six Revisions site always seems to come up with intelligent posts which inspire. If you haven’t already, you should follow their tweets. The just put up a post called, “Excellent Examples of Using Photos in Web Design” and I’d have to say it’s a great collection. I read a lot of these “lists” each day for inspiration and most of the time, it’s recycled garbage, but I’d have to say this post by Six Revisions showing the usage of photography as the basis of your Web site design is great.

Using photos as a design element and central piece in a web design is a great way to get a point across to the viewers or to just add more depth into the design. We are going to look at some examples of two popular ways of using photos in a web layout: using a large photo as your background and using a photo as the central focus in the header.

You can read their post here:

http://sixrevisions.com/design-showcase-inspiration/using-photos-web-design/

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This article titled, “Joomla And WordPress: A Matter Of Mental Models” from Smashing Magazine contends that your choice of CMS depends on how you expect Web applications to allow for theming and core manipulation.

Open-source content management systems (CMS) are a large family of Web applications, but if we’re looking for stability, performance and average technical requirements, we’ll come up with a handful of options. In the past, choosing the “right” CMS was a matter of the project’s requirements, but now this is not completely valid because the paradigm of extensibility had driven the development of major CMS’ towards a model of core features that are extensible with plug-ins that fill virtually any requirement.

Picking the right CMS is then a matter of “mental models”: choosing the one that best fits our vision of how a Web application should work and what it should provide to users and administrators.

In this article, we’ll explore the main difference in the mental models: of WordPress and Joomla for theming and extending their core.

It’s an interesting read. I wish they would have thought about Drupal in this equation (which I’ve now come to prefer over Joomla) but the article and as usual with Smashing Magazine the comments are well worth taking a look at.

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