Entrepreneurs Tara and Mike Voigt launched SAS cupcakes with a progressive vision to create fabulous gourmet cupcakes through a national brand that wasn't limited by regional demographics. So it’s not surprising that e-commerce was a cornerstone of their strategy from the outset. "You're either in the big pool or the baby pool and you have to make your choice right from the start," says Tara. Their cupcakery has certainly made a  splash on the gourmet sweets scene. Founded in 2006, SASCupcakes serves customers all over the country and they've picked up national press accolades including a major feature on the Food Network. They've also caught the attention of major retailers, and credit their web site and e-commerce capabilities with helping them land an exclusive agreement with Saks Fifth Avenue.  

SAS Cupcakes teamed with Infomedia to develop their website and they have grown from a single storefront in Newark, Delaware to a national brand that has the distinction of being the only traditional cupcakery in the U.S. with a full e-commerce site. "Our progressiveness sets us apart, and Infomedia helped give us the confidence and ability to take the site to where we knew we needed to be,” says Tara.

In the company's day to day operations, Tara is the "face" of the company, managing retail, merchandising, marketing and branding. Her husband Mike collaborates on brand development from the back of the house, managing everything from recipe development and baking to logistics and financials.

Their gourmet line now includes forty different combinations of gourmet cupcakes and SAS was the first cupcakery to offer occasion-based assortments. Cupcakes for bridal and baby showers are among their biggest sellers. Tara says one the greatest perks of the business is that every day is a celebration, with the cupcake team providing sweet treats for people celebrating special occasions.

Tara says the SAS website and the applications they use seamlessy blend three fundamentals of their operations: local customers may place orders for pickup, local deliveries can be ordered and scheduled, and for customers all over the U.S., ordering and shipping can all be handled online.

Tara and Mike are excited about their next step: opening a second SAS Cupcakes storefront in Charlotte, North Carolina later this year. Their e-commerce plans are expanding as well as SAS Cupcakes continues to enjoy steady growth. Check out www.sascupcakes.com to get a taste of what all the excitement’s about! 

Cyber-criminals are always on the lookout for new tricks, but they are also sticking with an oldie-but-goodie-abusing search engine results.

According to security pros, there has been a significant increase in the tactic since January. On March 10, officials at Symantec noted attackers were using sponsored search results on Yahoo to lure Web surfers to malicious site that promoted a fake anti-virus product called "Antivirus & Security."

The search result purported to be a link to the latest version of AVG Technologies' anti-virus software. In truth, however, it led to Antivirus-2009-new.com and Antivirus-pro-download.com, where users were asked to make a payment to buy a membership to get the rogue AV application.

Also on March 10, McAfee found cyber-criminals were making use of the Google page rank of Democrats.org to improve the chances their malicious links would appear in Google searches. According to McAfee, hackers have been flooding the community blog feature on the site with bogus posts and malicious links for several weeks.

"Starting at the beginning of this year we've seen a significant increase in the number of malicious sites ranking high on popular search terms," said Craig Schmugar, a threat researcher for McAfee Avert Labs. "What we are seeing is that the attackers are targeting high-ranking sites such as Democrats.org to post their content and cross-linking many Web sites. They are also copy/pasting content from high-ranking Web sites, such as those that appear at the top of Google News results."

Google took action recently against a number of malicious sites McAfee found were using subjects such as the recent Gmail service outage and the rogue "Error Check System" application on Facebook to boost their rankings and entice victims.

"In all cases, we actively work to detect and remove sites that serve malware from our search index and our ad network, and we immediately suspend accounts found to contain ads pointing to sites that install malware," a Google spokesperson said. "To do this, we have manual and automated processes in place to enforce our policies. However, it's important to recognize that this issue affects more than just Google and other search engines, as these afflicted sites are still part of the general Web. We're always exploring new ways to identify and eliminate malicious sites from our index."

Beyond what the search engines are doing, security vendors have built technology into their anti-malware products that examines behavior as a way to block suspicious activity. Symantec, for example, just launched a beta of a technology called Norton Safe Web that prescans sites.

"The main challenges are to scan such sites often because how safe they are changes over time and also to improve our accuracy in correctly identifying a bad site versus a good one when we do scan," said Zulfikar Ramzan, technical director and architect for Symantec Security Technology and Response. "While I [don't] expect these types of threats to show signs of abating any time soon and while attackers have tricks up their sleeves, I believe [security researchers] can be equally creative on our side to anticipate these surprises and protect people."

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Source: eWeek.com