Did you ever have to go through the dilemma of sudden wrong behavior of your website? As a matter of fact yes you might have! In such cases you are often advised to scan content of your website. You may also get stuck with how to scan website to purge malware. Again when your main source of income ( website ) has infected like that, it puts your business at risk.
In todays post, we are going to discuss how to identify malware on your site, how to scan website to purge malware, types of it, preventive measures with respect to website, unpaid and paid solutions for your website hack situation and to purge malware off of it. Without further a due, lets check out how to scan the website and purge malwares.
Malware types
Ransomware-
Ransomware is a malware in which hacker party would get control of your system or site including files and its content. They would ask you to pay ransom in return to get things released. It is as if you are paying for a crime you didn’t commit. According to reports the most recent ransomware attack was made on Nvidia. You may check the top 5 ransomware attack here.
Backdoor-
A backdoor is a type of malware which avoids the authentication of your system or website and puts the seed in. Using that seed the other party can create a remote access to the system or website and steal the information.
Redirects-
This malware is easy to capture as compared to other malwares. Your website would redirect to some other URLs, sometimes am adult site or could be viagra one. Most of the times we can fix such malwares by disabling the index or control files (.htaccess or .user.ini) of website.
Phishing-
Phishing needs no introduction, its something intruder pretend to be someone else and phishes out either through email, clickbait and yeah those crazy short URLs. Once they get the information they wanted, they might ask ransom and those things. You may go through the list of recent phishing attacks here.
There are many to the list, we didn’t include all of them to keep things simpler as our goal is to focus on how to get rid of them. The full list of types can be found here. Lets checkout how we can identify them.
How to identify malware on website?
Well the question obviously coming to our mind is how to figure out if the website is hacked or has been compromised? The benefit of identifying whether the website is hacked is that you would be able take right actions in right time. You wouldn’t want your website have backdoor and intruders mess with orders, changing payment method of it, and you be like no sales so far? Obviously nobody is going to like that. Below are my observation being in the field about how it looks like.
- When you see something suspicious is happening on your website, like it redirects to east, west, south and north. (even after disabling control files off of the website)
- When you see too much boiler plate codes or files within the website host root path.
- Irrelevant files and seeing a ransom on web pages.
Such scenarios are tale tale signs of malware on site. Given below are the screenshots to give you an idea about how those scenarios would look like. There is always something you could do before things go out of your hand. Remember, prevention is better than cure. Lets checkout the preventive measures for such cases.
Preventive measures for website
There is nothin that can not be hacked, but we do have an option to put deepest layer to make it tougher. When it comes to preventive measures here are few basic things you might follow to harden it.
- Disable directory listing- If your hosting is apache based, create new .htaccess (if not present) on the root of the directory and edit it with custom code line as shared as
Options -Indexes
yeah that’s it. Once effective, intruders wouldn’t be able to list any other directory from the domain name itself. - Keep backups- Keep taking the backup of your last modified state of website, whether it is new post or new price change of products or designing changes on site. A backup copy would save you. You can keep the backups in safe drive to use them when the site is compromised.
- Change credentials- Keep changing hosting credentials, website login credentials, cpanel, plesk every week or month.
- Use secure device to access website admin pages- If you are multi employee company that handles and works on website, we suggest you that you install an antivirus software on local system that keeps operating system safe.
Unpaid solutions
Well when its too much late and the situation is in place. There are solutions available to undo the attack, both paid and unpaid. We would recommend that you scan your website first before considering any options. Please visit the Sucuri free scanner link and enter the domain name of your website. It would scan the site and result you the output.
Once you have verified about the result and confirmed that the malware is severe. Its time you take action and take the content of your site to local drives, such as downloading to your machine (laptop, desktop). You may download the content of your site either by archiving the content of your site within file manager and downloading it through FTP.
You would want to unarchive (unzip) the archived file and then scan the local drive or entire machine with any free antivirus or even built in antivirus. When the scan has completed and scanning purge result looks satisfactory, do upload the content back. If the issue still persists, look out for any local backup of your site and restore it back. You have gone through all steps but it didn’t make any difference, well that is when you must consider paid solutions.
Paid solutions
There are many paid solutions available in market. The first point of contact should be your hosting provider when you figured the website is compromised. The reason to reach out to your hosting provider where website is hosted is that they might have malware removal services and they could provide it in offer if you ask for it. One that comes in mind is GoDaddy’s Website Security plan, though the plan prices could be in control, but you get robust solution. Some of other security solution are listed as below.
Conclusion
We have seen how the malware may enter your site, what options you must try when dealing with such situations. This concludes about how to purge malware off of your website. Which website malware service you are going for or you would scan it locally? do let us know in the comment below. If you have any feedback to share or you seek for help, do contact us here. Have a bug free dinner, bye.
