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Blogging can be beneficial to some businesses and small and medium enterprises (SMEs), the Chicago Tribune has reported.

Websites can profit from a boost in credibility and get a higher search rank making the owners more competitive if they feature a popular and regular blog, the article comments.

Certified electrologist and owner of Face Reflections Liz Stapleton told the paper her website has attracted an extra ten clients every month since adding a blog and added that it was the ‘best business decision’ she had ever made.

By adding blogs SMEs can better compete with large firms by boosting their search rankings through the economic strategy of hosting a blog, a Northwestern University lecturer added.

Business Blogging Consultants’ Derrick Sorles gave further advice, saying that by adding one word to a domain name the likelihood that a blog will be found using a Google key word search increases.

On a personal level as well blogs can be beneficial as well. Petite Anglaise blogger Catherine Sanderson was fired from her job in Paris after her online comments about her job were discovered but her writing has now been made into a successful book.

Network Solutions, a domain name firm that registers internet addresses used in its own searches, said it is doing nothing wrong and in fact prevents domain name scams.

The company said it prevented so-called front running, in which scammers take advantage of a five-day trial period domain names without paying for them.

“This is a customer protection measure to protect customers from frontrunners,” said Susan Wade, spokeswoman for Network Solutions.

The company has attracted negative attention however because it tracks terms entered into its search field and registers them itself before selling them for a higher fee.

Vice president of the company, Jonathan Nevett, said in response: “Due to no fault of registrars, front runners purchase search data from internet service providers and/or registries and then taste those names.

“Some folks may not agree with our approach,” he said, “but we are trying to prevent this malicious activity from impacting our customers.”

Microsoft warned companies on Monday that a flaw in the way Windows searches for Web proxies could allow an attacker the ability to reroute traffic through a malicious server.

The security issues occur when a Windows computer attempts to find a proxy server using Microsoft’s Web Proxy Automatic Discovery (WPAD) technology and the organization’s domain name starts at the third level or deeper, such as somecompany.co.jp, the software giant stated in an advisory. The WPAD search first attempts to find the server using the fully-qualified domain name (FQDN), and if it doesn’t find the server will try the next higher level of the domain name. For example, a search for a proxy server in somecompany.co.jp will look for servername.somecompany.co.jp and then move on to servername.co.jp, which could be a malicious server outside the company’s network.

“At this time, we are not aware of attacks attempting to use the reported vulnerability, but we will continue to track this issue,” Tim Rains, a spokesman for the Microsoft Security Response Center, said on the teams’ blog. “The advisory contains several mitigations that customers can use to help protect themselves from attackers.”

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