How to Scan WordPress Site for Malicious Code?
WordPress is popular software that individuals and companies use to build their websites. Anyone interested to come up with their website could do it fast and simple. The WordPress software runs over 39.5% of the existing websites on the internet. This shows that it is a highly reputable website software and many companies and individual have benefited from it. These websites powered by WordPress are however not an expectation when it comes to the websites that online hackers target. They as well get attacked by Malware and the only way to do know if they are hacked is by scanning them.
6 Signs That Your WordPress Site is Attacked by Malware
WordPress sites are a big target for Malware attacks and one needs to be careful in knowing when their website is attacked to avoid their website from been damaged. This article will highlight six signs that would show that your WordPress site is attacked by malware.
Sudden Drop in Website Traffic
Websites are built for businesses or organizations to showcase what they do, all about their products and services, and even how to locate them. A company can assess its website traffic by checking through its reports from Google Analytics. These reports show how website traffic is if it is trending upward or downward.
A sudden drop in a website’s traffic is a sign that the website has being attacked by malware. It is therefore important to scan malware in a WordPress site to ensure that your website is secure at all times.
Bad Links Added to Your Website
Hackers have ways of accessing information from a website. One of the ways is by adding bad links to your website. These links are most of the time on the footer of a website. Such links are signs that your WordPress site has been attacked by malware. To be on the safe side ensure that you scan malware WordPress to detect these bad links.
Your Site’s Homepage is Defaced
Defacing a site’s homepage is a move that most hackers do not get into as most of them do not want to get noticed. Scanning malware in your WordPress site is for this reason necessary to detect your site’s homepage getting defaced as early as possible. If the defacement of your site is detected early, then your WordPress Site could be protected from further Malware attacks.
You are unable to login to WordPress
Not being able to log in to your WordPress site is another sign that your site has been attacked by malware. This would be proof that your account may have been deleted by hackers and hence you cannot log in again. Something that would lead to this, would be if your WordPress admin account having weak passwords.
In case one can recover their site, they should reset their password to a stronger and unique one. The other way to avoid another occurrence of them not been able to log in to their account is if by having often scanned for malware in their WordPress sites.
Suspicious User Accounts in WordPress
As earlier mentioned, WordPress sites are built by companies, business entities, schools, and people out to source various kinds of information. Some sites will require people to register in their sites for them to consequently receive service from the company. It is there where if a WordPress site recognizes suspicious user accounts that would be a sign that the site has been attacked by malware.
In the cases where a WordPress site allows for user registration, they should ensure that they have a registration spam protection software to block those people who could be detected as spam holders. Scanning malware in a WordPress site will also enable the website administrators in detecting these malware attacks.
Hijacked Search Results
It is also important for a WordPress site administrator to test the functionalities of a website before they make the site active. They could in such cases try and search for things that a potential buyer would want to find out from their site. If the search results bring out an incorrect result then this is a sign that the WordPress site has been hacked.
The hacker may have made that possible by injecting malicious code into the site. To avoid such occurrences in the future, there must be frequent malware scans for malware done in the WordPress site.
Conclusion - Try cWatch Website Malware Scanner
This article highlighted six signs that your WordPress site is attacked by malware. The six signs are a sudden drop in website traffic, bad links added to your website, your site’s homepage is defaced, being unable to login to WordPress, when you experience suspicious user accounts in WordPress, and hijacked search results.