All About Malware In WordPress. It becomes really difficult for WordPress users to be acquainted with all kinds of malware as new and enforced versions of malware keep popping up every new day!
The Malware attacks have increased several folds with the outburst of E-business and it becomes essential to know about it more before we are hit by a potential malware virus.
Having a good rapport with customers in the e-world is like a currency in itself, it becomes quaint-essential for the website users on WordPress to ensure that their credibility remains intact, hence, comes in the question of protecting the website from malware. It makes the clients dubious about their power to protect their own resources from malware viruses.
The major questions to be discussed in this blog are:-
- Detecting the malware in your WordPress
- Symptoms that your WordPress has been affected by the malware virus
- How do we stay away from WordPress hack and malware viruses
- How do we protect the website from future malware attacks
- Some of the basic FAQs for malware hack
- How do we do a quick fix as an amateur website holder
- How to ensure that we have successfully removed the malware virus
- Detecting Malware in your websites
There are many ways to detect malware:-
- Running antivirus scan on our computer
- Running online software which can detect malware(this software are available online for free and are really effective, as online tools have a bigger database on number of malware detected till date)
- Sorting the files according to the modification date of our data to look for the most recent changes which have been made to the files(this will ensure that we are able to see the files with recent changes post that looks for them manually and locates the malicious files),
- Regularly deactivate the different WordPress plugins and also clean up the WP themes downloaded on your website (We need to ensure that themes have been downloaded from reliable sources)
- Is your website affected by malware?
Some of the real-time indicators are:-
- The website was blacklisted by search engine etc.
- Complains from readers that desktop is flagging your site.
- Unusual behavior which cannot be termed as authorized
- Visible signs that your site has been hacked when opened via a browser.
- How do we protect us from further malware disturbances and sway away from them?
Malware affects our website in many ways which include changes in the appearances of your webpage; a hidden advertisement that takes your customers to different pages via “drive-by” downloads and infects the systems. These malicious viruses redirect and endanger your customers and make them lose private data, bank details, and other important website credentials.
It provides the cybercriminals with a gateway to enter in your lives, malware to enter your websites and crash your hard work of years and make us lose credibility which we have built in the business via your website. They can place spam content on your websites which will reduce your ranking in the search bar list because SEO spam will ensure such malicious links go as down as possible.
- Protection from Malware viruses
We need to ensure that all the vulnerabilities in your website are seal packed before we get robbed by any of the hideous malware viruses. Installing regular updates and patches ensures that we are able to secure your WordPress space in a better manner. It is essential we use plugins only which are essential; this ensures that your website has a minimalistic load of useless plugins and no risk of getting malware from unwanted plugins. The use of a vulnerability scanner and an automatic patching system is important for keeping us guarded against malware attacks.
Preventing is more important than regretting over what has already been lost, hence, we need to ensure that we take the following steps to ensure that no such future attacks limit your availability and dents are credibilities in front of the customers.
- Backup the website completely and do this regularly
- Change the passwords for the account
- Find the malicious user and detect them via different online programs made specifically for this purpose and delete them permanently from your website.
- The older account named ADMIN should be removed from your webpage, on the older accounts this was the page which was created on the account of the creation of a new webpage, hence, we need to remove this account completely.
- We should ensure that Login entry has limited number of attempts for logging into the account so that a certain number of attempts are detected within a short time from same IP range, then the login function gets disabled.
- This helps to prevent brute force password discovery and protect your WordPress from brute force attack. Also, you can hire WordPress Experts who will provide WordPress Help services.
- Information is never complete without talking about FAQs
Some of the FAQs to be answered are that, we should remain calm and focus on restricting the effect of malware rather than contemplating on what happened, check the local environment, check all the access points, ensure that none of the blacklisted plugins or themes have not been installed by us from untrusted source, reset all your access points, without a doubt, ensure that we have created a backup for your website.
- An amateur at programming? No issues, we got you covered!
Being an amateur does not mean, that you can act as the first aid kit for your website, it is very simple, and once you go through this drill, you will realize the more you understand it, the easier it is and comes with many great advantages. The following flow chat will you understand the basics of recovering from a malware attack.
- Are we finally safe from the malware?
The next few lines will give you a good idea at how to check that the malware has been removed successfully from your website.
- First, Login to your FTP or cPanel > File Manager. Your WordPress installation files on your web host should look like this:
wp-admin
wp-content
wp-includes
index.php
license.txt
readme.html
wp-activate.php
wp-blog-header.php
wp-comments-post.php
wp-config.php
wp-config-sample.php
wp-cron.php
wp-links-opml.php
wp-load.php
wp-login.php
wp-mail.php
wp-settings.php
wp-signup.php
wp-trackback.php
xmlrpc.php
- Delete everything you see except for the wp-content folder, and the wp-config.php file.
- Now your installation should look like:
wp-content
wp-config.php
- In your cPanel > File Manager, click on and edit the wp-config.php file. Just make sure there are no strange codes in there. If there is malware in this file, it will generally look like a long string of random text. Compare it to the wp-config-sample.php file to be sure.
- Now go into the wp-content folder. It should look like:
Plugins
Themes
Uploads
Index.php
Endings are always good when you know the process inside out!
By going through this blog, you will understand how your website was affected, how the malware can be removed, how you can limit the damage done to your website and credibility in the market, what steps an amateur can take up, and then lastly, what should your website look like after the process. Also, you can hire WordPress Experts for WordPress support service and also, who can remove malware from your WordPress website.