5 Tips For A Successful Conversion Rate Optimization Program

If your business is struggling to compete online, it might have less to do with your competitive landscape than with your conversion optimization program.
The simple fact is that many companies can — and do — impede their website optimization efforts by having information silos, territorial teams, groups with tactical mindsets, aversion to change, and an unproductive focus on vanity metrics.
All of the above derail progress even before you factor in other companies who may have better or more mature conversion practices than your own.
Sound familiar? Here are five tips for tackling these internal conversion killers.

Tip 1: Start Small

People are afraid of change. Business organizations are no different. There’s a good chance that you’ll encounter some resistance while trying to implement your conversion rate optimization (CRO) program. Dealing with internal politics can be stressful, so it’s a good idea to have a plan for handling these challenges early on.
If you’re just starting out, it’s often best to keep your CRO initiatives small. This way, you won’t attract too much attention and won’t be too dependent on outside support. For instance, you can focus on testing and tuning unimportant landing pages first (e.g. a landing page from one of your marketing campaigns) and slowly build your case towards the more important, high-traffic ones.
The key here is to appear as non-threatening as possible. The last thing you want is to attract the attention of risk-averse constituents in your organization and get your project shot down (or shut down) before you have a chance to prove its merits.
Departmental silos and territorial thinking are among the biggest obstacles you’ll face in the course of moving your optimization projects forward. Conversion rate optimization requires a lot of teamwork, often from people who have disparate orientations and agendas. Even if you start out as one-person program, you’ll find that the future success and continuity of your program depends on getting more people on board, especially since the resources you need might be in another department.
By keeping your projects small at first, you can get things done with minimal help from designers or IT folks. Use these opportunities to make enough gains to help persuade the naysayers to support your efforts.
If you want your CRO program to move forward, minimize its scope and concentrate on demonstrating its value to the company. You can always increase the scope of your program when you’ve gained wider support.

Tip 2: Expand KPIs Beyond “Traditional” Conversions

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are metrics which let you know how near or far you are from achieving certain business goals.
Of course, one of the most valid KPIs for evaluating your marketing strategy is your conversion rate. But it shouldn’t be the only one you should be monitoring. It might be paradoxical, but the easiest way to fail in conversion rate optimization is to obsess over your conversions.
Taken as a single metric, your conversion rate won’t tell you about visitor intent, where people get stuck, or why users drop off without converting. Worse, if you have a high enough conversion rate, you can be misled into thinking that your website (or any of your channels, for that matter) is doing well even if your revenues are actually stagnant or down.
After all, you can just as easily increase your conversion rate by eliminating all non-converting traffic or drastically cutting down prices. Both are legitimate ways to boost your conversions, but they’re also not very smart.
If you want your optimization program to succeed, then learn to see how CRO fits into the big picture. And the only way to do that is to use metrics that matter to your business. If you’re an e-commerce retailer, for instance, you’d want to know the effect of your optimization activities on average order value and how many times a customer purchases from you. Or, if you’re in B2B, you might want to track conversions side by side with lead quality or the length of your buying cycle.
The key here is to focus on KPIs that are tied to profit improvements. This way, you’re not only bringing tangible benefits to your company, you’re also strengthening the financial case for conversion rate optimization in your organization.

Tip 3: Review Your Entire Funnel

Another downside to focusing just on conversions — and thinking of only purchases or leads as conversions — is that it’s a great way to chase obsolescence over time.
The top of the funnel matters. Sure, many of the people who visit your site to get a specific question answered will not become leads, and they will not become customers. But providing meaningful answers to people in that stage gives you a shot at getting remembered when the time comes that the visitor gets past the research stage and is ready to buy something.
PDF downloads, time spent on page or time spent reading for informational pages, blog visits – these are all things that you should pay attention to even if your calls-to-action, your lead forms, or your shopping cart were not necessarily in play.
Each part of the funnel has a different strategy attached – the top of the funnel may be search engine optimization and partner sites heavy, the middle of the funnel may involve keeping your promises upstream, and the bottom of the funnel can involve forms that do not ask for the world in return for a PDF, or a cart that people can understand and operate without giving them the urge to physically harm their laptops.
Each part of the funnel will require a different tactic, and a different success metric.

Tip 4: Know Your Tools & Tactics

It’s entirely possible to have a sound strategy but to fail at the tactical level. Companies with successful CRO programs have a knack for selecting and using the best possible tools to support their efforts.
If one of your objectives is to identify the sources of friction on your site, then your tactics could include primary user research and usability testing. If your objective is finding out what elements in your site attract visitor attention, then you’ll need the help of heatmaps and other visual analysis tools. Your tactics would vary depending on the objectives of your program (and, of course, your available resources).

The use of heatmaps like this one created by AttentionWizard is a

good tactic for learning about visitor attention on your site.

In order to choose the right tactic, it’s imperative that you learn the strengths and limitations of the activities and tools at your disposal. Usability and accessibility testing, for instance, is very useful in uncovering the myriad of issues that your visitors encounter on your site; but, they’re not of much help if you’re trying to discover how you can make your website more persuasive in convincing visitors to click the buy button.

Likewise, A/B testing can’t give you meaningful results if your website is making visitors jump through a lot of hoops. Even the most persuasive copy will fail to move the needle if your site is plagued with a haphazard information architecture and visitors can’t find what they need.

So, aside from ensuring that your tactics correspond to specific objectives in your program, you should make sure that the prioritization of your activities makes sense. Remember that like most programs, your conversion rate optimization initiatives operate under certain resource constraints. It pays to pick the right tactics so you can prioritize budgetary and time allocations when implementing your program.

Tip 5: Don’t Forget To Monitor & Evaluate For Impact

Monitoring and evaluation activities basically involve checking your accomplishments against your KPIs. Monitoring helps you learn if your projects are going as planned, and if not, what difficulties are keeping you from doing things that need to be done. Regular monitoring therefore allows you to resolve problems as they arise, change tactics and direction when necessary, and revise and improve your strategy if it seems ineffective in attaining a goal.
Evaluations, meanwhile, are valuable sources of information on the short and long term effects of a CRO program on the organization. Evaluation activities are done not only to gauge how successful your program was in achieving the desired outcomes or goals, but also to identify unintended effects. As such, evaluations often involve looking at not just the financial outcomes but also the influence of the program on leadership processes and cultural elements.
Done right, the monitoring and evaluation of your CRO program can provide lessons for a smoother way of implementing program activities. More importantly, data from these activities can give you insights on which tactics were most effective (and which ones were not) in getting your desired results, which in turn helps you create a better program.

Understanding Your Business

Businesses face different sets of challenges related to conversion rate optimization. Some of them are benign and easy to work through – others, well, not so much. It helps to understand early on which challenges you will be facing, so you can gradually make your CRO program better.

7 Limitations Of Big Data In Marketing Analytics

As everyone knows, “big data” is all the rage in digital marketing nowadays. Marketing organizations across the globe are trying to find ways to collect and analyze user-level or touchpoint-level data in order to uncover insights about how marketing activity affects consumer purchase decisions and drives loyalty.
In fact, the buzz around big data in marketing has risen to the point where one could easily get the illusion that utilizing user-level data is synonymous with modern marketing.
This is far from the truth. Case in point, Gartner’s hype cycle as of last August placed “big data” for digital marketing near the apex of inflated expectations, about to descend into the trough of disillusionment.
It is important for marketers and marketing analysts to understand that user-level data is not the end-all be-all of marketing: as with any type of data, it is suitable for some applications and analyses but unsuitable for others.
Following is a list describing some of the limitations of user-level data and the implications for marketing analytics.

1. User Data Is Fundamentally Biased

The user-level data that marketers have access to is only of individuals who have visited your owned digital properties or viewed your online ads, which is typically not representative of the total target consumer base.
Even within the pool of trackable cookies, the accuracy of the customer journey is dubious: many consumers now operate across devices, and it is impossible to tell for any given touchpoint sequence how fragmented the path actually is. Furthermore, those that operate across multiple devices is likely to be from a different demographic compared to those who only use a single device, and so on.
User-level data is far from being accurate or complete, which means that there is inherent danger in assuming that insights from user-level data applies to your consumer base at large.

2. User-Level Execution Only Exists In Select Channels

Certain marketing channels are well suited for applying user-level data: website personalization, email automation, dynamic creatives, and RTB spring to mind.
In many channels however, it is difficult or impossible to apply user data directly to execution except via segment-level aggregation and whatever other targeting information is provided by the platform or publisher. Social channels, paid search, and even most programmatic display is based on segment-level or attribute-level targeting at best. For offline channels and premium display, user-level data cannot be applied to execution at all.

3. User-Level Results Cannot Be Presented Directly

More accurately, it can be presented via a few visualizations such as a flow diagram, but these tend to be incomprehensible to all but domain experts. This means that user-level data needs to be aggregated up to a daily segment-level or property-level at the very least in order for the results to be consumable at large.

4. User-Level Algorithms Have Difficulty Answering “Why”

Largely speaking, there are only two ways to analyze user-level data: one is to aggregate it into a “smaller” data set in some way and then apply statistical or heuristic analysis; the other is to analyze the data set directly using algorithmic methods.
Both can result in predictions and recommendations (e.g. move spend from campaign A to B), but algorithmic analyses tend to have difficulty answering “why” questions (e.g. why should we move spend) in a manner comprehensible to the average marketer. Certain types of algorithms such as neural networks are black boxes even to the data scientists who designed it. Which leads to the next limitation:

5. User Data Is Not Suited For Producing Learnings

This will probably strike you as counter-intuitive. Big data = big insights = big learnings, right?
Wrong! For example, let’s say you apply big data to personalize your website, increasing overall conversion rates by 20%. While certainly a fantastic result, the only learning you get from the exercise is that you should indeed personalize your website. While this result certainly raises the bar on marketing, but it does nothing to raise the bar for marketers.
Actionable learnings that require user-level data – for instance, applying a look-alike model to discover previously untapped customer segments – are relatively few and far in between, and require tons of effort to uncover. Boring, ol’ small data remains far more efficient at producing practical real-world learnings that you can apply to execution today.

6. User-Level Data Is Subject To More Noise

If you have analyzed regular daily time series data, you know that a single outlier can completely throw off analysis results. The situation is similar with user-level data, but worse.
In analyzing touchpoint data, you will run into situations where, for example, a particular cookie received – for whatever reason – a hundred display impressions in a row from the same website within an hour (happens much more often than you might think). Should this be treated as a hundred impressions or just one, and how will it affect your analysis results?
Even more so than “smaller” data, user-level data tends to be filled with so much noise and potentially misleading artifacts, that it can take forever just to clean up the data set in order to get reasonably accurate results.

7. User Data Is Not Easily Accessible Or Transferable

Because of security concerns, user data cannot be made accessible to just anyone, and requires care in transferring from machine to machine, server to server.
Because of scale concerns, not everyone has the technical know-how to query big data in an efficient manner, which causes database admins to limit the number of people who has access in the first place.
Because of the high amount of effort required, whatever insights that are mined from big data tend to remain a one-off exercise, making it difficult for team members to conduct follow-up analyses and validation.
All of these factors limit agility of analysis and ability to collaborate.

So What Role Does Big Data Play?

So, given all of these limitations, is user-level data worth spending time on? Absolutely — its potential to transform marketing is nothing short of incredible, both for insight generation as well as execution.
But when it comes to marketing analytics, I am a big proponent of picking the lowest-hanging fruit first: prioritizing analyses with the fastest time to insight and largest potential value. Analyses of user-level data falls squarely in the high-effort and slow-delivery camp, with variable and difficult-to-predict value.
Big data may have the potential to yield more insights than smaller data, but it will take much more time, consideration, and technical ability in order to extract them. Meanwhile, there should be plenty of room to gain learnings and improve campaign results using less granular data. I have yet to see such a thing as a perfectly managed account, or a perfectly executed campaign.
So yes, definitely start investing in big data capabilities. Meanwhile, let’s focus as much if not more in maximizing value from smaller data.

How To Create A Content Marketing Culture At Your Company

Creating a content marketing culture at your company can be quite the obstacle. Making even the smallest of modification to company policies and procedures can be extremely difficult, so how do you go about changing the entire company culture?
For most, creating a culture of content will require a shift in mindset from the top down – starting with the executives, and ending with each and every employee across departments and teams.
When you’re seeking such a dramatic shift, begin your campaign with senior management.

Convince Your Boss

Management must be on board to drive the cultural shift and successfully change the mindset of the rest of the company. Because of this, the first step in creating a content marketing culture is convincing the boss to invest in content marketing.
When pitching higher-ups on content marketing, focus on the following:

• Pitch Personalization – Personalize your pitch to your executives. Try to explain content marketing in a way that relates back to their personal interests. Talk to the CFO in financial terms, the CMO in terms of marketing objectives.
• Education – Educate the executives on what content marketing is and what it can do for your business.
• Objection Handling – Come prepared with rebuttals to common content marketing objections, including upfront cost and ROI.
• Competitive Situation – Showcase what your competitors are doing with content marketing. Explain how you can fill the gaps and present the same information better.
• Strategy – Lay out your plan from beginning to end, including timelines, implementation, content creation, promotion, and measurement.

Get Everyone On The Same Page

Once you have management buy-in, take the necessary steps to make sure everyone is on the same page with your content plans.
Explain the purpose of your content strategy. Why is the business getting started with content marketing? What are the business goals and objectives toward which you’re working?
Additionally, be sure to share the content marketing process. How will you brainstorm ideas? What does the creation process look like? Where and how will you promote your content?
Sharing these details will help each employee understand their role in the content marketing process, as well as the “big picture” going forward.

Invest In The Vision

As soon you roll out the company’s content marketing vision to your employees – put your money where your mouth is and invest in the vision. If you truly want to transform the culture at your company, you will need to provide the tools and training your employees need to succeed.
Also, consider investing in new hires – a content leader or better, a content team, to manage the content process. This team will serve as your internal spokespeople for content by illustrating the value of content to the rest of the company.
It should be responsible for content strategy development, ideation, and content creation. Additionally, the team should be in charge of cross-department coordination, and continually developing creativity internally.
Though your marketing team will have to work hand in hand with the content team in order to achieve success with content marketing, employing a team to focus specifically on content strategy and creation has its advantages.
Not only does having a content team tell your employees you’re serious about making this culture shift, but it ensures your content strategy won’t fall by the wayside or get put on the backburner.

Enable & Encourage

Though your content and marketing teams will manage the process from content strategy to measuring ROI, every single employee should be able to and encouraged to participate in the content process. Start by including different teams and departments in brainstorming sessions.
Some of your employees spend more time with customers than others, but each one can bring something to the table. Through these brainstorming sessions, you will you gain new perspective for content ideas while the collaborative environment can be great for team building.
Also, encourage employees to contribute to content creation, and let them know that it’s okay to spend work time doing it. Provide guidelines so the content will be closer to meeting the standards necessary for publishing, but also have members of your content team tasked with editing employee-generated content.
Staying “on brand” through tone, style and voice is important, and your editors can ensure that content created by colleagues fits the bill before it’s published.

Reward Top Participants

Not feeling appreciated is the number one reason Americans leave their jobs, so employee recognition needs to be a high priority. Fortunately, your content culture may create more opportunities for employee recognition. Make it a point to reward your top content performers – first and foremost by recognizing their accomplishments in front of their superiors and peers.
This can be done in many ways – perhaps in a company-wide meeting, or even in a “company announcement” type of email. Be sure to highlight the content created, and any results – traffic, social metrics or ROI – to further showcase the value of content and possibly inspire others to contribute, while giving your employee the credit deserved.

Practice What You Preach

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, creating a content marketing culture at your company starts with management. To successfully foster a content-focused culture, higher ups need to participate and lead by example.
Sure, some employees will participate without needing much convincing, but others will mimic what others are doing – especially upper management.
Like hiring a leader or team devoted to content, C-suite-level participation also sends a message to other employees – this “content” business is here to stay.  When some of the highest-ranking managers start participating in content creation, others will certainly follow suit.
Creating a content marketing culture won’t be easy – but it can be done. From getting management buy-in and investing in the vision to enabling, encouraging and rewarding employees who contribute, successfully shifting the mindset across an organization will take perseverance and a lot of hard work.
While you shouldn’t expect the employees’ mindsets to change overnight, following the above steps will help put your company on track to fostering a culture of content in no time.

Anonymous Member Placed on FBI Terrorism Watchlist

Jeremy Hammond, one of the well-known Anonymous members, who took part in some of the hacking group’s largest cyber acts, can be now found in the FBI’s terrorism watchlist.

 

Some leaked document from the NY state division of criminal justice services revealed that Jeremy Hammond was classified as a possible terrorist organization member and instructed not to advise him he was on a terrorist watchlist. The document in question is dated from around the time of the hacker’s arrest and suggests that he was put on a Terrorist Screening Database compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. However, it is unknown why the FBI offered to include the Anonymous member on the watchlist.

Of course, civil liberties groups were concerned that a person with no record of terrorist behavior should be classified in this way, unless the US government has expanded definition of terrorism to including hackers.

Jeremy Hammond was arrested three years ago and sentenced in the end of 2013 to ten years of jail time for participation in Anonymous high-profile hacks. For example, he took part in the release of 5 million emails from the private intelligence company Stratfor. The hacker was prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and there was never any suspicion that he was involved in terrorist organizations. In addition, Jeremy has always insisted he is an activist and not a criminal, let alone a terrorist.

In response, the Terrorist Screening Center responsible for administering the database claimed they could neither confirm nor deny whether anyone may be included in the database, because it would impair the government’s ability to investigate and fight terrorism.

It is known that the guidelines governing terrorism watchlists are cast very wide to include “acts dangerous to human life, property or infrastructure”, which are “intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population” or “affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction”. The representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union admitted that the approach of the American government to the watchlists was quite controversial, since it had a very broad definition of terrorism, along with a poorly defined standard of “reasonable suspicion” with many exemptions.

Infectious Porn Video Back on Facebook

The new pretend-porn trojan was fast enough: it has infected over 110,000 Facebook users in a couple days. It works as follows: one of user’s Facebook friends shares a porn video and it appears in the user’s news feed. After it is clicked, it asks the user to install an update for the Flash software, instead installing malware.

 

The malware tags the infected user’s friends in a post containing porn video clip. The clip itself can’t be played, as it asks to download a (fake) flash player to run. Of course, instead it downloads the actual malware. Security experts revealed they have been monitoring the new malware for the last 2 days where it managed to infect over 110,00 users and remains on the rise.

Once the trojan infects someone’s account, it re-shares the video adding up to 20 tags of their friends. This helps it spread faster than previous malware, which was distributing itself through private messaging on Facebook. The experts dubbed the new malware “Magnet” and explained it was able to hijack victims’ keyboard and mouse movements.

Of course, this is not the first time porn videos have been used in Facebook-targeted malware scams. For example, last summer, there was a scam designed to look like a YouTube video of someone stripping in front of their webcam.

In response, Facebook said they were aware of the latest malware, and were doing what they could to stop it spreading further across the network. Facebook used several automated systems in order to identify potentially harmful links and stop them from spreading. The company also explained that these malware varieties are normally hosted as browser extensions and distributed via links on social networks. Facebook blocks links to the scams, offers cleanup options and extra measures to make sure its users are safe.

Journalist and Anonymous Member Sentenced to 63 Months

Barrett Brown, a journalist and one-time member of Anonymous, was recently sentenced to 63 months in prison. His supporters from across the web had hoped the 33-year-old would be able to walk free with his 31 months of time served for “merely linking to hacked content”. However, the court decided it in the other way: Brown, who used to act as a spokesman for Anonymous hacking ring, has got more than twice that sentence. Moreover, he was also ordered to pay over $890,000 in restitution and fines.

 

Barrett Brown was sarcastic about the sentence, saying that the government must have decided that since he did such a great job investigating the cyber-industrial complex, they’re now sending him to investigate the prison-industrial complex.

On the other hand, Brown was facing a possible combined sentence of more than a century. However, when prosecutors dropped some charges against him following a plea deal, his sentencing parameters were reduced.

The industry observers pointed out that long sentence would set a precedent for journalists, because it means that if anyone shares a link to publicly available content without knowing what’s in it, they could be prosecuted.

Barrett Brown is known as an investigative journalist, essayist and satirist. He was working for the Onion, Vanity Fair, the Huffington Post, and the Guardian. The journalist has split with Anonymous in 2011. In addition, it is known that Barrett founded Project PM – this is a crowdsourced investigative thinktank disclosing the abuses by companies in surveillance.

He was arrested in September 2012 for allegedly threatening a federal agent in a YouTube video. After being held for 2 weeks without charge, Brown was indicted on charges of making an online threat and conspiring to release personal data about a government employee. After two more months, Barrett was indicted on a dozen of further charges connected with the hacking of private intelligence contractor Stratfor in 2011. In the meantime, the hacker who actually hacked Stratfor was already caught and sentenced to 10 years term in prison, while Brown was punished for merely linking to hacked content.

Brown remains a great speaker. In his statement to the judge before his sentencing, he said he regrets about posting the “idiotic” threatening videos, while pointing out that those were made in a manic state brought on by drug withdrawal. At the same time, Barrett also criticized the government for its methods in pursuing the case. He was particularly concerned that contributors to Project PM also might be indicted under the same charges.

After the judge announced the ruling, Barrett struck a different tone, claiming that for the next 32 months, he has a great job – he will get free food, clothes and housing while seeking to expose wrondgoing by Bureau of Prisons officials and otherwise report on “news and culture in the world’s greatest prison system”.

The interesting fact is that Ladar Levison, the operator of the Lavabit email service used by Edward Snowden, attended the court for the verdict. As you may remember, Levison preferred to close down his service rather than let the FBI in.

WikiLeaks Will Sue Google and US Government over Email Revelations

The online service is determined to fight back in an escalating war with both the tech giant Google and the American government, claiming that it is going to start legal action the day after demanding answers for the Google’s handover of WikiLeaks’ Gmail contents to the US government.

 

The problem is that the targets of the investigation weren’t informed until 2.5 years after secret search warrants were issued and served by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. WikiLeaks claimed it would be looking at legal action not only with Google, but also those who actually turned in the “illegal and arbitrary” order. The whistleblowing service also insists that any information used from the taking of documents this way should be considered as biased and illegal and therefore can’t be used in the proceedings.

WikiLeaks insists that was a clear violation of rights. In response, Goggle pointed out that its policy is to tell people about government requests for their data, except for the cases when they are gagged by a court order. Unfortunately, this happens quite frequently. Google also claimed that it has challenged many orders related to WikiLeaks and pushed to unseal all the documents related to the investigation.

The problem is that WikiLeaks received the notification of the court order from Google only before Christmas 2014 and published it online. As for the tech giant, it insisted that the legal process was initially subject to a nondisclosure order, which barred the company from disclosing the very existence of the legal process. In the meantime, WikiLeaks doesn’t even know whether Google even went to court at all, and if it didn’t, that would not be good, because Google is expected to litigate on behalf of its subscribers.

It is known that the Google court order targeted 3 employees of the whistleblowing service: two journalists and a spokesperson. According to the wide-ranging scope of the order, all email content, including all messages (even deleted ones), drafts, login data and contact lists had to be handed over to the US law enforcement.

WikiLeaks also pointed to Twitter as an example of best practices for tech firms responding to government requests. The microblog notified the target of a similar demand from the law enforcement, and the warrant in question could be fought in court.

Microsoft Will Distribute Windows 10 for Free

The software giant announced the end of nearly 3 decades of history, launching its first free version of Windows. Microsoft recently unveiled Windows 10, its first update in 2 years, while announcing that a new operating system would be a free upgrade (only for the first year though) for users of Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone. Microsoft is planning to release Windows 10 later in 2015, but no specific date is set yet.

 

However, there were even more surprises from Microsoft: the company also unveiled its headset, Hololens, which will work with Windows 10 by allowing people to interact with 3D holograms, including holographic Skype calls. It should be noted that the development comes shortly after Google shut down the development phase of Google Glass, its online-enabled headset.

The industry observers point out that the decision to distribute Windows 10 for free marks a major shift for Microsoft, because the company has always made most of its profits from selling its OS – Bill Gates launched its first version, Windows 1, back in 1985. Although the company does not provide specific figures for Windows’ revenues anymore, it is known that they were eclipsed by its Office suite of services in 2013.

Microsoft still dominates the market of personal computers, but loses to Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS in mobile computing. The company was previously called to offer its operating system for free in order to outrun its rivals, which do not charge for their software.

Windows 10 will be able to run across personal computers, mobiles, tablets and even Microsoft’s Xbox gaming console. The new version of Windows will also bring back Windows Start menu, which was dropped in Windows 8. The latter, by the way, failed to convince many Microsoft users to upgrade – the statistics say that the OS, launched three years ago, is currently on 10% of PCs and 20% of tablets.

Microsoft previewed the new version of Windows to business customers back in 2014 and announced that it would skip Windows 9 in its attempt to mark a break with the past (or maybe just because Windows 9 could have problems due to being confused with Windows 95 and 98 by some software). The developer preview has been downloaded 1.7 million times and 800,000 pieces of feedback have been left.

Dotcom Announced End-to-End Encrypted Voice Chat

Dotcom’s encrypted cyberlocker Mega has announced free end-to-end encrypted voice and video chat supported through the web browser. New MegaChat promises to keep users’ video chats secure and private, and is dubbed a “Skype killer” by its creator.

 

The New Zealand entrepreneur announced the step-by-step release of #MegaChat, which currently offers video calling and is going to provide text chat and video conferencing soon as well. The service requires no software beyond an Internet browser to operate, unlike many other similar services. However, the developers also offered plugins for Google’s Chrome and Firefox for “faster loading and added resilience against attacks”.

MegaChat allows Internet users to share encrypted files after previously sharing a personal decryption key with them. Kim Dotcom is sure that no online service provider based in the United States can be trusted with data these days and Skype is no exception – it also must provide the American government with backdoors. Kim Dotcom pointed at Edward Snowden revelation of Microsoft providing the NSA access to encrypted messages.

Now Dotcom positions MegaChat as a secure alternative to Skype, which can’t be tracked by security services that use end-to-end encryption to keep privacy. MegaChat service is based in New Zealand. The MegaUpload founder also promised to offer encrypted video conferencing, email and text chat later.

In the meantime, the industry experts point out that Mega’s security credentials have been questioned previously. For example, user passwords were stolen from Mega shortly after its launch two years ago, which made security researchers question whether new Dotcom’s service could live up to its security promises.

Hackers May Use Home Routers for DDoS Attacks

According to security experts, the well-known hacking group Lizard Squad may have been using hacked home routers in order to run its LizardStresser service. The latter helps launch DDoS attacks to take online portals offline. The hackers started their LizardStresser a few weeks ago, shortly after their own attacks affected Sony’s PlayStation Network and Microsoft’s Xbox Live services over Christmas.

The LizardStresser online service charges anyone between $6 and $500 to start their own attacks against any websites and services they want. The high-profile console attacks work as a large marketing scheme for the hackers’ commercial ambitions.

The industry experts believe that LizardStresser can run because many Internet users don’t change their default passwords on home routers. Apparently, the service draws on the bandwidth from the cracked home routers all over the world, because many of them are not protected by anything else except for factory-default usernames and passwords.

The security researchers point out that the malware used by the hackers with the purpose to build its network of “stresser bots” has been operating for about a year now, and is able to affect commercial routers at educational institutions and businesses, let alone households.

In the meantime, the security experts point out that aside from turning the infected host into attack zombies, the malware uses the infected system to scan the web for other devices that could allow access through the default credentials, like “admin/admin” or “login/password”. In other words, all infected hosts keep trying to spread the malware to other home Internet routers and other devices that are able to accept incoming connections (through telnet) with default settings.

A group of the researchers who desired to remain unnamed is currently cooperating with the law enforcement officials and Internet service providers in order to help take infected systems down. Their ultimate goal is to disrupt the LizardStresser botnet entirely.

While they are on their way to achieve their goal, all Internet users are recommended to make sure they changed the default credentials on their home broadband router, such as the username and password. In addition, it will appear useful to also encrypt the connection in case of using a wireless router.