Survey Time

What's up? How have you been? Hope you've all been doing well. Time's flying by and we are already entering April. That's absolutely crazy. I can safely say we are all on the final stretch to the end of the school year. Now, for the past two weeks, I have been working on the ever-so elusive survey which you will all finally get your hands on. Everyone seemed super excited to take the survey, and I am really happy about that. The links will be included at the bottom of this post. For now, I am going to talk about the final touches on my survey

In order to finish up the survey for public use, it had to go through some stages of editing. After compiling a list of all the questions, I would go through and read each one very carefully in order to make sure they were as clear and concise as possible. They had to be impartial and easy to answer. When people think about a question for too long, they become bored and impatient, and will probably answer the following questions very poorly. Some questions ended up needing to be elaborated upon. Some were combined with others. Some were taken out completely. It ended up looking professional and understandable... until my mom came in with the mind set of someone not tech-savvy (she's definitely not adept with technology). She would slap some sense into my tech-geared mind, so terms and other procedures that make complete sense to me but may leave someone like my mom completely clueless had to be revised. It wasn't until this round of editing was completed that my survey was ready for release. Because you can't have more than a survey with more than 10 questions without paying for it on SurveyMonkey, I had to split up my survey among two links. Make sure that if you do decide to take my survey, which I really implore you to do, take both. There's also a cool little activity at the end of the survey for you to do. Just a little something to spice it up.

In addition to finishing my survey this week, I also took it upon myself to mess around with all the different anti-virus/anti-malware services. I did basic research learning a lot more about why there are multiple services when they all pretty much do the same thing -- protect against malware. I plan to actually pit them against real malware by placing harmful malware on my computer. Of course, it will be in a controlled environment. But hey, if something does go wrong, I've been planning on changing the parts in my computer for a while now, so I'd have an excuse. Maybe I'll even record myself doing so, and let you guys see it in action next week. Who knows? We'll have to wait and see. 

Here are the links to the surveys. Survey 1 Survey 2 . The first is linked to my first survey, and the second one to my second survey. Take them in order, and I hope you like the end. As always, it had been a pleasure writing this blog and I look forward to reading your comments. As usual, this is Adam, signing off.

Survey

Hello everyone! As usual, I hope you had a wonderful weekend, and welcome to this week's blog. 

As you should have read in my previous, I finished up all of the plug-ins my mentor recommended. From there, I had to decide what to do next. We came up with a few more plug-ins just for fun as they aren't necessary for my research as well as outlined the remaining parts of my research. What we came up with was the survey, which I had already planned to do from the beginning, and continued our conversation from there. It led to many topics I could include in my survey which would be narrowed down and formatted to fit the typical syntax of a survey. I do not have the survey finished because I would really prefer to finalize and perfect every aspect of it. I can't afford to be unprofessional and colloquial in my diction because I am basically asking you guys for your own time to help me. I digress. This post will be going a bit more in depth what my survey will cover. Consider it a teaser for the actual release.

One of the most populated topics of cyber-security that people (that is, people not privy to cyber-security) discuss is passwords, and the theft thereof. What defines password security? What makes it strong or weak? What is a good password? Well, that's one of the many questions my research plans to help answer and, in order to make my argument much more convincing, I need to gather data from you. Now, I'm not going to ask for your passwords. That's just idiotic. I'm going to ask about your thought process. Do you simply choose a word that means nothing to you? Or is it an item or idea very special to you? Do you commonly use uppercase. numbers, symbols? How long do you tend to make your passwords? I need to know these facts in order to show you what people do, and help change your poor password choosing habits. I need to also make clear in  my survey that I intend to keep all these answers confidential. Well, I shouldn't even say keep. Everyone will be anonymous and I intend to trash your answers once that data is collected. I need the participants to feel safe and comfortable when answering. You'd be surprised how many people shy away from these things or may feel embarrassed when bringing up a poor habit. It is crucial that my data accurately represents what you guys actually do, not what you think you do.

Now this is only one of the topics that will be included in my survey. I will be asking about your online habits and security programs. Where do you keep your passwords? Do you save your passwords? Do you visit unsafe sites? Why do you think they are unsafe? safe? These are the kinds of questions I will be asking. I hope you better get an idea as to what I plan to accomplish after reading this. It's a much more arduous task than I originally thought -- one I didn't think would take this long. I hope you enjoyed my blog this week and I look forward to reading your comments. As always, this is Adam, signing off.

What's Next?

Good morning, afternoon or whenever you are reading this! I hope you all had a wonderful spring break as I know I did. I can't count the number of shows I caught up on over break. Alas, all things come to an end. Enter the next week and I'm already onto the next steps of my project, but, first thing's first, I had to finish all the plug-ins that I promised to cover. All that was left was WordFence security which I was saving for the end. I also managed to meet up with Mr. Vange Thursday to talk about the next steps I had in mind. 

WordFence security is self-explanatory: it enhances the security capabilities of your website. The installation was super quick and easy, but allowed for much versatility. The most important feature that I could take advantage of was scanning. The scanning feature allowed the plug-in to scan my website for any security vulnerabilities. Of course, my website did not have any problems, but with very large websites. There are so many plug-ins and themes scattered around the code that it would be very hard to keep track of with just a few people. That's why the computer scans for you. That is probably the most useful, but there are many other features. You could set up two-step verification, limit sign-ins live if you are in the middle of an attack, black-list ips, ban networks by finding the attackers exact location, and set-up a firewall. There are many other features, but these are the one's I found the coolest. Here is a picture of all attacks happening on all WordFence security networks: (These are just the ones that have been blocked)

Now, as for the future, I plan on looking at a few other plug-ins -- one or two, but don't expect that many. One that I am looking forward to is CloudFlare which is a CDN or content or cache delivery service. Basically, a system of distributed servers (networks) that deliver webpages and other web content to a user based on the geographic locations of the user, the origin of the webpage, and a content delivery system. OK, maybe not basic, but all you need to take away from that is it will act as another layer of security and means to gather more data about the website. On top of this, as we approach the end of school, I need to be thinking more end game. So, as I initially planned, I am going to create a survey that will be collecting necessary data for me to use in my research. I am not going to tell you anything about it. You will have to take it yourself. No, I require that you do. It should be ready in the next couple of weeks. After discussing what I should bring up in my survey, Mr. Vange and I just talked about cyber-security and hacking in general which helped a ton in coming up with questions for my survey.

So, this is what I have been up to this past week. Again, I hope you all had a fun and exciting spring break, and, as usual, this is Adam signing off.

Spring Break

This week is my Spring break.

JetPack and WooCommerce

Hello, everyone! Welcome to this week's blog! So this week I worked with JetPack and a little bit of WooCommerce. JetPack as most of you should know from last week's blog acts like an add-on to the WordPress core. Developed by the WordPress team, it allows website owners to more easily manage their website through a variety of functions. There are two versions a paid and free. I did not use the paid version that comes with lots more functions, but I can speculate. Some functions that I can perform for free are stats (site visits, refers, etc.), adding social media buttons so people can share my website, publicizing where my posts are automatically uploaded to my social media, and email subscriptions to name a few. Those are the first few that came to mind, but there are many more. As for the paid version, there are tools for SEO, google analytics, and enhanced video uploading to name a few. SEO stands for search engine optimization. If you search something related to my page, and I had prime SEO, then my page would be the first to pop up on your screen. I think you can understand the benefits of that. It does come with some security benefits such as security scanning which constantly scans your website for threats and anti-spam protection.

After working with JetPack, I decided to move onto WooCommerce. WooCommerce allows the user to transform their website into an eCommerce website with all the necessary tools to monitor one. There are many plug-ins that improve WooCommerce, but that is not a concern. I am just learning what is required to create one (dealing with the security and information analytics). It does pose a problem since I have already created a website that functions like a social media website. I do not want the two to interfere with each other, so I am thinking of creating a second website utilizing WooCommerce. It should not be a problem creating another since I already dealt with the beginning processes to make one, obviously. I also want to read a lot more into the details of WooCommerce. Out of all the plug-ins I have in my arsenal, this one is the most bulky. Bulky is a sense of "there is a lot of stuff to learn". I am looking forward to this considering my parents run an eCommerce website -- well, own one. They have a team that deals with all the technicalities. They just have ownership.

I will be taking my Spring break next week along with you guys, so there will be no post next week. I hope you all will have a wonderful Spring break without too much work. If you have any tests coming up, good luck! Adam, signing off.