How to Remove malware from your Website?

If you suddenly realize that your website is infected with malware, what would you do? The mere thought of a malware attack is scary, isn’t it? malware can affect your computer system in more ways than one. Sometimes, hackers use them to collect sensitive information, sometimes they are used to disrupt your operations and hold you to ransom, making you feel completely helpless. There are other malware which spam your system or if you are the administrator, then those of your clients’, with unwanted advertising or information that has not been sought. A malware, which is a portmanteau for “malicious software” is hard to get rid of.

The problem of getting infected with malware is that Google might mark your site as “unsafe”. A message may be displayed to that effect to the visitors. It could be a great deal of embarrassment and loss of face for your company. Also, if some malicious code is embedded in your site, a search engine would continue to crawl it and the links found in the source code may get indexed to your link profile. That could get you into further trouble.

How would you know that you have been hacked?

It is not always easy to tell if your site has been hacked. You should look for malicious links in your source code first. For example, if you have a site called yoursite.com, where ‘yoursite’ represents your website, and you see links and content that does not seem remotely related to your site, it is possible that your site has been hacked.

What would you do in the aftermath of a malware attack?

If you feel that the security of your website has been compromised, you should immediately start by changing and strengthening websites. If you have a WP powered website, you should change your FTP password and your WP admin password. Try to set longer and stronger passwords which use multiple characters because hackers often use software which are extremely quick and can use brute force to guess the correct password. You may consider changing the file access permission to ‘read only’ in case you find malicious links in your ‘.htaccess’ files.

One more important tip is to check your plugins in WP because they are often infected, especially if not updated. Just disable them by renaming the directory. If the live web scanner shows that your computer is now clean, you would know that that problem was in the plugin. You can now change the name of the plugin directory to the original one, and the site would go live again.

Conclusion

If you are not very tech-savvy or someone who is not good with programming, you could leave the problem to a professional expert. You may visit stackddesign.com, and create a ticket explaining the malware problem, and the professionals at ‘stackd.design’ will take care of the malware problem for you.