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We’ve broken down what our core values ​​mean for you and your business and why you’re in safe hands when you use Namecheap for your domains, hosting, and security online.

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Savings you can make

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When does the New Year Sale start?

It all kicks off on January 10 at midnight ET and runs for seven whole days (until 11:59 PM on January 17). Check it out now, and make this the moment you will look back on and mark where it all began. Our specially-created offers can help start you on the right path with the digital side of your business, and our articles will help guide you along the way — now it’s over to you!

An innovative and trendy solution of sharing your contact information, doup. (it rhymes with “soap”), aims to save the planet with a convenient way of connecting people. But when user data is the core of your business, you need secure and reliable hosting that can keep up.

Business cards are a product ripe for innovation. Low-tech and resource-intensive, taking those easily-lost pieces of paper online just makes sense. That was Mantas Michalauskas’s reasoning when he cofounded doup., which represents a new era of business cards.

Unlike some other digital business cards, doup. doesn’t require the user to download an app and allows everyone with an internet connection to see your contact details. This innovative system found its home on Hostinger, the ideal hosting provider to meet doup.’s high demands.

A Mantas on a Mission

For co-founder and COO Mantas, entrepreneurship is in his blood. His superpower is to take simple solutions and make them more attractive and convenient to users. The key is listening to users’ needs and translating them into an indispensable product.

Mantas initially put his marketing degree to work as a Marketing Manager for various brands before embarking on his own venture. His company, doup., was initially founded as a 3D design agency long before the idea of ​​business cards was on the table.

After finding success in Lithuania with a different side project – a fundraising platform called Contribee – Mantas and his colleagues put up. on the back burner while the designers found other jobs. Mantas was about to close doup. when a colleague from previous projects suggested the idea of ​​selling business cards.

Mantas was intrigued, and together they started to think about what they could offer to their clients and how they could differentiate themselves from the competition.

Why Business Cards?

The need for business cards has remained in the digital age, and companies are still actively using them. While face-to-face meetings were less common during the lockdowns, now they’re back, with people actively sharing their contacts and ordering business cards.

The aim of doup. is to replace an outdated product with an alternative that saves the company money, is sustainable, and extends the possibilities of contact sharing. People can save their contacts on the phone, eliminating the risk of losing them and allowing synchronization and editing at any time.

“The idea itself came to my colleague because of the sustainability aspect,” explains Mantas. “As the owner of another company, he was faced with a high turnover of employees, which meant that he had to change their business cards very frequently. That’s when he started looking for potential solutions.”

Digital business cards have been gaining traction over the past decade as people increasingly recognize the drawbacks of relying on physical, printed cards. By digitizing the product, fewer natural materials are used, the costs are lower, and the user has more flexibility when changing their details.

“doup. is not an innovation that we exclusively invented.” Mantas says, “There certainly are alternatives, but none have caught on in the Lithuanian market and the surrounding countries. We saw a niche, realized that we could offer a more practical and better product, and decided to seize the opportunity.”

The company created a platform, which was launched at the end of 2021, and began a communication campaign with influencers that winter.

This showed positive results, and sales immediately began to increase. It was an indication that with doup. they could achieve something special.

Behind the Curtain of doup.

While the idea behind digital business cards may not be a novel one, what doup. has innovated is the design of its system.

A doup. customer buys the physical card product and pays a one-off fee. This gives them free access to the online platform. They can edit their account and choose what to display on their profile, whether it’s personal and contact information, page links, social network accounts, documents, photos, or videos.

All this is available to users through a single product purchase and without the need for an app download. There are then several options for sharing contacts. All doup. products are equipped with an NFC chip, so when you touch your phone with the card, an account opens on your phone. There are also QR codes that can be shared with others.

“We are developing and improving the product daily, expanding the range and improving the functionality,” Mantas says. “We have recently launched a Pro version.”

If you prefer to use an app, doup. has you covered, too. The company recently launched an app that allows you to edit all your contacts. Even if you leave the physical product at home, you can open the app anytime and show the QR code. You can also create unique links to your profile that can be put on a social media description or sent to other people via email or Messenger.

The broad number of options, flexibility, and focus on the eastern European market means that doup. has been attracting a lot of interest from customers and investors alike.

A Word-of-Mouth Success

A promotional campaign with influencers helped to kick doup.’s success off strongly. “Just posting a visual on Facebook is not enough to sell our product effectively,” explains Mantas. “People need to see how the connection between the card and the phone works to understand how cool it is and that they actually need it.”

While needing customers to see the product at work to understand its value may seem like a drawback, once a few doup. products were out in the world, it became a strength. Word-of-mouth marketing would become one of the most effective sales tools for the company.

“There was a period from February to April or May when we did absolutely no marketing campaigns because we had a limited budget, and it was mainly spent on improving the platform, developing the app, and launching new features,” says Mantas. “Sales did not stop at all. Every customer brings us at least one additional customer because they are satisfied and truly use our product.”

Impressed by the company’s success so far, a Maltese company is investing almost €200,000 in doup. This investment will fund an expansion, create new jobs, and allow employment. to open a branch in Malta to facilitate access to southern Europe.

“We have great ambitions and goals for a technological solution that will take off. to the next level. I won’t reveal too much yet, but it’s coming soon,” Mantas smiles.

How Reliable Hosting Makes doup. Possible

At the core of doup. is its website and the system inside. Naturally, then, the company’s success rests on reliable hosting that allows the team to securely collect users’ data while enjoying the flexibility to create and innovate.

With these specific needs in mind, Mantas chose to turn to Hostinger, on whose servers all doup. customer contacts are hosted.

“When I choose a service, I always make sure it has good support. We believe that providing excellent customer support is the number one aspect. Hostinger’s 24/7 support was something that stood out about this company from the very first days.”

The developers at doup. find that Hostinger offers the opportunity to bring their concepts to life online, whether it’s NFC business cards, eCommerce, or product usability. “We use the Cloud Professional hosting plan offered by Hostinger. It allows us to operate efficiently and expand our ideas. The main features we use are File Manager, MySQL databases with phpMyAdmin management, cron jobs, FTP accounts, and email accounts.”

With so much sensitive user data being collected, it’s crucial that security be tight. That’s taken care of – doup.’s hosting plan includes free SSL certificates for data encryption, dedicated resources, IP addresses, and advanced measures to protect against DDoS attacks.

It’s important to Mantas that security doesn’t get in the way of service and collaboration. “I was just saying to a colleague that it’s possible to give the freelancers or developers who work on the app separate access to the hosting account. This way, they could implement any updates needed for the app, but at the same time, they wouldn’t have access to our customers’ sensitive information.”

Mantas says, “Such flexibility is crucial for a company like ours.” This is why Hostinger remains dedicated to staying flexible as well as functional.

Linux environments have suffered a massive uptick in malware attacks over the past year, and bad actors are carrying out their attacks with the help of lots of different techniques. As an operating system that hosts various servers and backends for other applications, Linux has become the target of cybercriminals interested in compromising critical infrastructure.

Considering that Linux-targeted malware is on the rise and is becoming more sophisticated, organizations must understand which attacks they should look for and how best to secure their critical infrastructure along the way. To that end, let’s dive into what a Linux malware attack is, as well as the most common ones to keep an eye out for.

Linux malware attacks: what are they?

Most of the modern cloud environment’s hosts use Linux as an operating system, contributing to the recent rise in Linux-targeted malware attacks. Threat actors who successfully infiltrate Linux-based environments can compromise a vast array of sensitive assets and use ransomware to cause severe damage to critical infrastructure.

The past few years have seen bad actors attacking Linux-based systems to gain access to networks and compromise critical infrastructure. These attacks have been successful thanks to vulnerabilities and issues with authentication and server configurations. In fact, these attacks have not only been distressingly successful but are diversifying, too. Malware strains targeting Linux-based platforms have been increasing in categories such as trojans and ransomware since 2020.

Types of Linux malware attacks to watch for

As more organizations migrate to cloud-hosted environments that use Linux to operate, it’s likely that Linux malware attacks will continue to surge. As code uniqueness found in Linux-targeting malware strains continues to increase, it’s essential that organizations understand which attacks to look out for and how best to defend against them.

To that end, let’s look at some of the most common types of Linux malware.

Malware targeting VM images

Ransomware gangs have recently begun to sniff out Linux-based environments vulnerable to attacks. And while many malware samples aren’t exactly impressive in quality, dangerous groups such as Hive, Conti, and others are actively improving the quality of their malware.

Ransomware that compromises cloud-hosted environments is typically planned out thoroughly, and skilled threat actors will attempt to ultimately compromise an environment before encrypting compromised files.

Ransomware that compromises cloud-hosted environments is typically planned out thoroughly, and skilled threat actors will attempt to completely compromise an environment before encrypting compromised files. In particular, cybercriminals now seem interested in targeting virtual machine images that are used for workloads. This interest indicates that threat actors are on the prowl for precious resources hosted in cloud environments in order to inflict as much damage as possible.

Certain platforms can provide Linux workloads running in both cloud-based and on-premises environments with defenses against malware attacks. Some of these platforms now use machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide organizations with the necessary context and visibility to identify malware attacks on their workloads — the number of platforms that use machine learning to do this is likely to increase in light of the fact that the market for machine learning’s CAGR is expected to reach nearly 39% between 2022 and 2029.

Cryptojacking

Among Linux-targeted malware attacks, cryptojacking is one of the most pervasive. Cybercriminals stand to make quite a bit of money from cryptojacking — if successful, they’re able to generate cryptocurrency by using their malware’s computational resources.

Cryptojacking caught the public eye in 2018 after Tesla’s public cloud suffered an attack. Hackers compromised the company’s Kubernetes console due to a lack of password protection and, from there, gained access to sensitive data.

Gangs that use cryptojacking malware will often target victims with the help of default password lists or exploits that compromise poorly secured systems that have been unintentionally misconfigured. Once threat actors have successfully installed and executed their malware, they can sit back and watch as cryptocurrency is mined for them.

Unfortunately for device owners, cryptojacking malware often goes unnoticed since it’s designed to mine for cryptocurrency in the background — they may only notice that their device is suddenly running more slowly. Organizations can keep an eye out for signs such as a sudden surge in their device’s CPU usage and device overheating. Antivirus software can keep malicious crypto manners from running their malware and will make it easier to detect attacks earlier on.

Security experts who keep an eye on nation-state organizations have been reporting that nation-state groups are doubling down on their attacks against Linux environments. The Russian-Ukraine war, in particular, appears to be contributing towards an uptick in Linux-targeted malware.

Media reports have, in the past, pointed to Russia as the culprit behind cyberattacks in the wake of its Crimea invasion, as well as more recent attacks in Ukraine. These attacks were reportedly carried out with the intent of shaking up communications, and Russian state-sponsored gangs of cybercriminals continue to stoke the anxieties of Western governments.

Companies that have been diligently monitoring the Russia-Ukraine war have reported instances of Solaris and Linux worms using the Secure Shell Protocol as well as compromised access credentials in order to spread rapidly. These attacks are carried out with the obvious intent to destroy sensitive information held within file systems and databases.

Fileless attacks

Security researchers have pointed to groups of cybercriminals using the open-source, Golang-written Ezuri tool to encrypt malicious code. Once it’s been decrypted, the malicious code leaves no traces on the disk since it is executed from memory, thereby making it nearly impossible for antivirus software to detect. The group mainly associated with this file-less attack technique is called TeamTNT, which attacks improperly configured Docker-based systems to install crypto miners and DDoS bots.

How to avoid being targeted by malware

To protect against Linux-targeted malware, developers and system administrators would do well to remember to avoid a certain “economy of attention”: they should avoid racing against time whenever possible and cultivate an environment that cautions against blind trust in things such as community- sourced code.

Cybercriminals have all the time in the world to pounce on this “economy of attention,” and they are patient enough to wait for something like a developer mistakenly leaving a container deployment vulnerable to the public that can be used as a spearhead for other attacks.

It’s also important that organizations pay particular attention to security group settings and firewalls that their Linux servers use, lest they invite external access to applications that are deployed on their servers. Linux-targeted malware does best in an environment of servers and consumer devices, specialized operating systems, and virtual environments; take great care to invest in thoughtful and thoroughly planned security measures that protect these things.