Secure your campaign sites

Have you ever wondered why there are those individuals out there in the world of the web that just exist to hack in and to compromise your work? I have. There isn't really any meaningful gain to be made from doing it yet it happens all the time. The trick is to make sure that whatever you build, you try and get in the head of the 'hacker' as you build. Believe me they will try everything to get in there and mess with your system, purely for the thrill of it.

There are a large number of forums out there so take a quick look as you are building to see what type of processes are being used and the methods employed to get in. Lock up your code as best you can, use encryption and secure protocols for passing sensitive data around because they are looking for it.

So if your online promotion has a form for entering in data be sure and trap as much information about your users as possible to get back to the source of the input. This means IP address, time and date. Use methods to stop bots and server apps such as Captcha to make sure your entries are from humans, not servers.

Make sure your hosting location is robust enough to handle a large amount of activity, whether legitimate or not, this includes your database.

Food for thought, don't let your promotion go sour because there was a little hole through which an enormous amount of data was squeezed.

Here's a good article from Adobe about reducing risk of attack on Flash based applications.