The Indie York Advert Calender

Details

Category: Businesses

Created on Thursday, 03 December 2020 11:31

Written by Northern Living

The Indie York Advert Calender started on the 1st of December!

Every day until Christmas Day we’re going to be providing you with some festive fun, and the chance to get some great deals, offers, or discounts, and even win some fantastic prizes, from our Indie York members!

Let’s start with an easy one to get the bauble rolling! Sign up to our mailing list today and we’ll pick one lucky winner at random to win a £50 Hamper from an Indie York member.

https://confirmsubscription.com/h/i/0C12A4FCE3A4AE48

The winner will be announced on Christmas Day and prizes will be available in January 2021.

Regular updates here - https://www.facebook.com/indieyorkmap

Website - https://www.indieyork.co.uk/

York Walking Festival

Details

Category: Businesses

Created on Friday, 28 August 2020 07:16

Written by Northern Living

During the York Walking Festival (5th-13th September 2020) why not stroll in and around the city centre looking for clues in York's High Street Independents’ windows? 

Eagle-eyed participants will see single word clues in each of the windows of the 69 participating businesses.  Guess what the theme linking them is and you could win a £50 York Gift Card.  For example, if you see the words ‘goal’, ‘kick’, ‘pitch’ ‘whistle’ ‘penalty’ ‘corner’ ‘off side’ then the theme is ‘football’.  There are 7 clusters of businesses, which means you can guess 7 themes.  But you only need to guess one correctly to enter the prize draw.

See www.itravelyork.info for how to enter the prize draw and other information about the York Walking Festival.

This is a jointly organised event (between Indie York and the iTravel Team) to encourage people to walk more in the city and to discover York's High Street Independents.

A great event for families and visitors of all ages to discover York's many Independent businesses and rediscover our beautiful City. Printed maps available from all businesses taking part in the treasure hunt, Visit York Information Office and available to download from the Indie York website.

‘Indie York’ - York Independent Business Association

Details

Category: Businesses

Created on Thursday, 04 June 2020 08:36

Written by Northern Living

Indie York (York Independent Business Association) is a not-for-profit association which was set up in 2016 following the Boxing Day floods of 2015; when so many independent businesses were adversely affected. Indie York have been sponsored and supported, from their inception, by The York BID, the City of York Council and Bootham School. The Association presently has just over 200 members from a range of sectors including Food & Drink, Retail, Culture, Health & Well Being, Accommodation and Services. Indie York’s aim is to encourage residents, visitors and local students to use the wonderful array of independent businesses in York. They produce a widely distributed map that is available at the Visit York tourist office and all Indie York member businesses. Indie York also has a website helping you to find your favourite independent businesses. 

"York is a city of independents with around 65% of businesses being independently owned. We have such a rich mix of independents covering all sectors which gives our city a very distinctive offer of eclectic, unique businesses. Indie York has always been about working together." Said Johnny Hayes MBE, the Chairman of Indie York.

The independent sector has always played a crucial part in sustaining York's local high street; many businesses having been established for decades or many generations of family ownership. “Indie York provides a platform for independent businesses to have a bigger voice as a collective than they would on their own. It feels like there is a genuine desire to bring real value to each and every member business.  In these current difficult times, Indie York have been brilliant at highlighting the businesses who have remained open, but also supporting those who have temporarily closed by sending regular information and guidance. For us, as a hotel and restaurant, we have obviously been severely affected and our normally lively business has been eerily quiet, so we really appreciate Indie York reminding consumers that supporting an independent business doesn’t only mean financially - a like or share online means the world to us.” Said Rebecca Hill, Galtres Lodge Hotel.

Once again York is facing a huge challenge during the Corona Virus pandemic which has affected all sectors of society. During these uncertain times Indie York has teamed up with Coaching York to offer free business coaching to their members. They have also worked with local companies to make masks which have been distributed to local businesses. The independents have been quick to diversify during this time by offering deliveries, collections and online offerings. Indie York also supports them by promoting their member news via social media.

“There are some real success stories and collaborations that have come out of this crisis. The independents have really stepped up to the mark to provide what they can to support their customers and many businesses have been donating their services to support the vulnerable in their communities and also providing free meals to NHS staff at York Hospital; it is very heartening to see these small businesses making a big difference. The local community have  backed these projects and in turn are supporting the independents now, more than ever. This support needs to continue if these businesses are to survive as they face uncertain futures. A future without York’s independents takes the heart and soul out of our city” said Sara Amil-Smith, Indie York Administrator.        

The Red House
1 Duncombe Place
York YO1 7ED

Web:- https://www.indieyork.co.uk
Email:- This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Tel:- 07307 209072

DDOS Attacks March 2019

Details

Category: Businesses

Created on Friday, 05 April 2019 11:15

Written by Northern Living

The latest wave of DDOS Attacks.

Firstly it might be helpful to define a DDOS Attack. DDOD stands for Distributed Denial Of Service. In the simplest of terms the attack is launched by a series of automated Bots from a large number of infected machines at a specific pre-scheduled time. The objective of these attacks is to drown the server which hosts a given Website in millions of page requests over a very short period of time and force it to Deny Service. Or more likely crash monumentally. There are many reasons an attacker might want to do this. Some are personal, others are much more complex, are totally impersonal and to some extent random.

There have been several large corporations and many smaller businesses attacked  by the latest version of this form of attack over the last month or so. Larger corporations are unlikely to admit that they have been successfully attacked unless they are forced by publicity to do so. Unfortunately these attacks can be as dramatic and costly for smaller businesses. They can also put the business at risk of prosecution under the General Data Protection Regulation 2018 if they are in Europe. The reason for this risk will become clear shortly.

The wave of DDOS Attacks which emerged in early March 2019 have been given the relatively bland title of “Memcached Q4”. What they are called is quite academic. Their objective is where the potential GDPR2018 liability takes effect. The reason for this specific wave of attacks is the extraction of name and email details en masse from as many servers as possible. Eventually these will find their way to “Spam List” which are supposedly segregated info specific lists based on geographic location, interest, gender etc. and are available in some of the darker areas of the Internet. Generally information gathered by form pages on websites is stored securely encrypted in a database well out of sight of any would-be extraction Bots. But as a server is overwhelmed by a DDOS attack there is a possibility for a Bot to access the databases undetected by the usual security systems as the server struggles to deal with an ever increasing but momentary spike in demand.

There are several stages to these attacks and the delivery mechanism is becoming very sophisticated.

A brief list of some steps involved in one particular attack process is as follows. (Although there are many other processes.)

(1) A Bot finds your URL by randomly generating possible Domain Names and “Spidering” those which work, looking for form pages. You are likely to receive a bunch of spam form returns which often appear to have a Russian origin and include a great deal of Cyrillic text.

(2) After determining that your site collects name and email information your URL is added to a list of possible target sites.

(3) This list is sent to another Bot which has only one objective. That is to determine the “Colour” of the Operating System your hosting server is running. A .php suffix on your URLs indicates a Linux variant. A .net suffix indicates a Windows variant. There are various other more exotic Operating Systems, but these are the two main players. The means of attack are similar, but the database systems are different and need to be targetted in different ways.

(4) Once this initial data mining is complete everything might well seem to go quiet for several months. In fact you might never be targetted as these mined lists are sold on the Black Market. If your site appears to have few visitors or is unlikely to yield useful contact data then the details are unlikely to have an saleable value. If however your site details are bought and your site attacked you'll probably suffer a brief period of outage and a few choice warning emails from your hosting provider about over quota data usage. This is the stage at which your site is attacked by numerous DDOS Bots with the intention of forcing the server to fall over.

All very clever. But also costly for you in terms of Data Bandwidth, potentially very annoying for your customers who are likely to find themselves the target of vast amounts of Spam email. Also there is the potential of prosecution under GDPR2018 as you have unknowingly allowed your customers details to be sold for malicious ends.

So what can you do to prevent this from occurring?

There very little that can be done to prevent Data Mining. It is an unfortunate fact that there are now more Bots active on the Internet than there are humans. 

However it is well worth speaking to your hosting provider and requesting the installation of “Flood Protection” Software. These packages are usually propitiatory and there will be a small registration cost. But once installed the software will detect the early stages of a DDOS attack and effectively Firewall your entire server account. “Flood Protection” software should also log the IP address ranges from which the attack originates which allows your hosting provider or in-house data manager to block IP ranges and effectively prevent further attacks from the same origin.