What is Malware and How to Cope With It?

What is malware?

Malware is a piece of code that is injected into your website by the attackers and your website may behave in the following ways.

• Your website goes down
• The homepage is replaced with a foreign page
• Your website redirects to porn or other malicious websites.
• Your website starts sending spam and ultimately is blocked by the hosting company.
• Your website does not show any visible sign of malware but starts downloading malicious code to the user’s computer.

In all of the above cases, Google and other anti-virus vendors will block your website with a message which asks the users not to open your website as it hosts malicious code, which leads to loss of business/customer base.

The malware attacks are visibly on the rise and one must know how to handle the situation if your site ever comes under malware attack and how to protect against them.  I will also discuss how you can protect your website against malware attacks.

What to do (In case of malware attack?)

Let’s review a few different scenarios to handle such situations.

You are taking regular backups

If you are taking the regular backups of your file system & database. then the best solution is to restore the website from your backup. Many backup solutions take daily/hourly or weekly backups on a third-party secure server and allow you to restore from backup in simple steps.

You are not taking regular backups

You have to identify the infected files with malicious code. You can check your site for malware on any free malware scanning site (i.e. https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/). And find the malware footprints. You will have to remove the malware from the files manually.
You can also reach out to your hosting company to identify the malware & remove it. They can run a quick scan to find and remove the malware files or give you the list of the infected files.

If the above solutions don’t work, you should immediately take developer help and clean your site. Not cleaning early may wreak havoc on your online reputation as more & more antivirus vendors will start notifying their users not to use your site (as it contains malware). even your hosting company may suspend your site.

How to protect against the malware

There is no foolproof way to stop malware infection on your website. However, a few steps can be taken to prevent malware from your website. Some of these steps are discussed below.

1. Keep the CMS updated with the latest upgrades.
2. If you are using plugins or modules on your website, make sure that you update them with the latest security patches issued by respective developers.
3. Always keep a backup of your website files and database. The best way is to configure third-party daily backups.
4. Regularly change the admin login password, and always use a strong password.
5. Every Open Source CMS has its strengths and shortcomings. You must research the shortcomings and do specific steps to cover them to keep your site secure.

I hope these points help you protect your website against malware attacks.

If your website is already infected and you are looking for a good cleanup service. Please get in touch with us: https://webgarh.com/get-quote.html