Category: Security

Work From Home Security Tips

In these days of social distancing, lock-downs, and shelter-in-place directives, far more people are working from their home offices, wherever those may be. As always, though, it’s necessary to protect yourselves from potential threats, cyber and otherwise. The following are a few mostly common-sense work from home security tips. Make sure your devices are physically safe (shut down or locked, as with a mobile phone you use to check potentially-sensitive

April 14, 2020

Use Unique Codes for Your Next Instant Win or Sweepstakes

Use unique codes can enhance your next sweepstakes, giveaway, or instant win game. With unique codes incorporated into your promotion you can: Provide tracking of entrants back to a region or store. Give your sales team a specific range of codes that can be tracked back to their sales, which can give you the opportunity to reward the highest producers. Pinpoint game participation to a specific geographic area. Determine

February 28, 2020

McMillion$ and the Importance of Instant Win Game Security

If you aren’t sure why instant win game security is that big of a deal, you might want to watch the new HBO docuseries called McMillion$. It details the strange, and almost unbelievable, true story of how an employee at a promotional marketing company called Simon Marketing, a former competitor of Marden-Kane’s, committed fraud in the McDonald’s Monopoly games between 1989 and 2001, bilking McDonald’s and their customers out of

February 13, 2020

How to Prevent Contest Voting Fraud

Eric Grimm, former Senior Programmer, wrote this piece about voting fraud — and how to stop it. Online contests are all the rage with the kids these days. After the initial entries are judged, frequently the finalists’ submissions are opened up for voting by the public at large to determine a final winner. If the prize is tantalizing enough, this creates a rather large target for voter fraud. This

January 19, 2016

Age Matters When Planning a Promotion

Fae Savignano, Marden-Kane SVP, provided this week’s post. When planning a promotion, age definitely matters. To fully understand this concept, we first need to define what the age of majority (legal age) means. The age of majority is the legally defined age at which a person is considered an adult, with all the attendant rights and responsibilities of adulthood. The age of majority is defined by state laws, which

February 3, 2015

Contest Considerations from a Technical Perspective

Eric Grimm, Senior Programmer, offers up this advice if you run a contest asking for user generated content. I’m going to focus on some UGC (user generated content) aspects from a programming and security side of the equation. Now repeat after me: NEVER TRUST USER INPUT! This is true with a simple form that only collects names and addresses, but requires even more caution when you are allowing large blocks

January 27, 2015

Ramping Up Your Promotional Website to Avoid a Crash

What do Target, Maserati, and SodaStream have in common? They all had web sites go down due to heavy traffic during a promotion. We frequently see companies like this spend thousands on advertisement development and placement, only to have the campaign go bad because someone forgot to plan for web site traffic surges. Don’t let this happen to you! If you are running a promotion that is driving traffic

September 26, 2014

We’ll Take Our Password Encryption with Salt, Thank You

Privacy, security and encryption of user data is crucial to Marden-Kane and our clients. Our team of programmers works hard to stay on top of the latest research and trends in data security to ensure the highest standards of privacy and security are met on all data we gather, pass and store on behalf of our clients. Today’s guest post, from our former Senior Programmer Eric Grimm, covers why basic

August 5, 2013

Social Engineering is an Often Overlooked Cause of Social Media Hacking

Hacking usually describes the malicious activities technologists engage in to steal information such as social security numbers from individuals. Hacking into social media networks is more about temporarily causing damage to a product or brand and not usually directed at an individual. The latter requires far less technical talent but they do have an advanced set of particular skills called “Social Engineering.” What are social engineers? They are sort of

February 25, 2013

How to Capture and Store Sweepstakes Entry Data

How to Capture and Store Sweepstakes Entry Data Sweepstakes are a form of lead generation for companies. Many companies determine who is interested in products or services based upon the emails, comments and blog posts received on the sweepstakes registration form As this customer data is captured, it is stored in databases. Several types of database solutions used to accomplish this goal, some of which are better than others. Here

July 31, 2012