Hackers inject malware into websites to take advantage of the site’s traffic as a way to distribute potentially unwanted applications into many visitor’s computers – yes, it’s devastating and this form of cyberattack will ruin your business.
What makes these malware injections worse is the hackers plant the kind of malware that evade detection. These types of malware bide their time until they receive a signal from the hacker to either allow the threat actor a backdoor entry or unpack a more dangerous form of malicious application unto the website’s database.
When this happens, it’s a race against time to uncover the malware before it unleashes its payload and cause damage to your website and to your reputation. The good thing is malware leave signs if they’re currently gestating within your site’s pages.
How to Detect and Remove Malware: Identifying Signs of Malware Infestation?
The key to detect and remove malware from website is to check your pages for tell-tale signs that an infection is afoot. Here are signs you need to look out for every time you’re administering to your website:
1. Look for Changes in Your Website’s Looks
The first thing a hacker or malware does is to leave obvious markers on a particular webpage. This kind of defacement or vandalism can be seen in changes in the text or the presence of images you didn’t upload. A violation of this nature is just a signal of things to come so you’ll need to start investigating so you can detect and remove malware from website fast.
2. Check Sudden Alterations in Your Credentials or Settings
One of the subtle changes web administrators notice when a malware infests their site are password changes and notifications. It’s as if someone is already planning to take over your administrator’s account right under your feet. It’s an alarming signal, one that tells you to invest resources to detect and remove malware from website as soon as possible.
3. Pages Aren’t What They’re Used To
When your webpages crash while they’re loading while visitors are accessing them can only mean a malware is disrupting their traffic. Another obvious sign is when you look at your website’s backend and you find certain files changed without your involvement.
4. Your Web Host Will Notify You of Infection
Your website traffic will suffer so the moment your statistics start to dip, you need to see if you have malware on your site. Aside from changes in your site’s online performance, your web hosting service will notify you if they find irregularities in your site that have led them to suspect it is infested with malware. Google may also delist your website from its search engine results pages if they believe the unaddressed malware infection can harm many searchers.
How to Detect and Remove Malware from Website: Removing the Malicious Application
After recognizing that you have malware on your website, you will need to do some sniffing to root it out and remove it from your site’s backend. To detect and remove malware from website requires hours of work. Here’s what you should do:
1. Download Your Site’s Files Onto a Computer
Some web hosting providers give web administrators tools in order to perform searches on their files using a command line. This command console allows web admins to look at directories of their files and find out what files have been changed.
If you don’t have access to a web console, the next best thing is to download all your site’s files onto your computer and to perform the searches from there.
2. Have Your Computer Search Using PHP Codes
Security researchers have identified common types of malware and have shared their PHP codes online. It’s best if you can find out what these code snippets are and then perform a search on the malicious application by using the snippets as search strings.
3. Take out the Tainted Files and Replace with Clean Ones
After you’ve isolated where the files are, the last step in your quest to detect and remove malware from website involves deleting the file. Yes, you’ll just need to delete the files and use a clean untainted copy from your back up to replace it. Just re-upload your files when you’re done and your site should be clean.
Lastly, there’s one step you can try to detect and remove malware from website that’s a lot more faster and a lot more convenient than the steps above. You can subscribe to Comodo cWatch, an automated cybersecurity protection system for sites. cWatch will automatically scan your files from time to time and remediate any potentially unwanted applications. Subscribers also gain access to cWatch’s blend of integrated features like security information and event management, cyber security operations center, managed web application firewall, content delivery Network, and tech support.