How to Fix My Website has a virus?
The extent of damage to a virus attack on your website depends on the number of variables. The longer you take to discover and remove the virus, the more expensive the recovery process becomes.
Several types of viruses are specifically designed to keep themselves hidden for as long as possible. However, the symptoms of the virus-infected website can become challenging to miss.
Today, we all came across some common queries like “my website has a virus how to remove,” so in this article, we’ll discuss all the necessary measures that you must take to remove a virus from your website.
Spotting Signs of an Attack
Specific malware attacks can be detected immediately. Even an amateur can spot the website’s defacements, where the hackers mask the existing website content with an image or message of their choosing.
While defacements make up small portions of virus attacks, but the more inconspicuous virus can leave a trace of its work, which is detectable by both the website visitors and owners.
Other visible signals of the virus-infected website are unauthorized modifications to your account login details, a significant decrease in the website traffic, pages that freeze or crash, and missing or modified website files.
Also, your web hosting company can detect a virus; you might receive a notification that could lead you to an account suspension. Several search engines can even blacklist your website if they detect any virus on your site.
Signs of attack are not a good thing, especially for small business owners. A virus attack can have long-lasting consequences. For instance, if your website is blacklisted or suspended, it could lead to a decline in revenue, damage your reputation, and even erode customer trust. No matter if your site serves as a primary point of sale.
How to Remove Virus from Your Website
Those who do not have any particular technical knowledge; outsourcing virus removal to an expert could be your best option. You can also use a website virus scanner, which will monitor your website daily and automatically delete the virus if detected.
Otherwise, individuals or developers with excellent tech expertise will choose to manually remove viruses themselves, depending on the resources and time available.
If you want to remove the virus by yourself, here are the steps:
Identify the source
You can perform this by using a command line, local file search, or a file manager. Most of the web hosts provide file managers, which are usually optimized for a necessary file modification, instead of specific content searches.
A local search means downloading your website's content to your local device, which makes the search process even more comfortable. Having access to a command line is common in the shared hosting case, but if you already have it, you can perform a far better-nuanced search efficiently.
With this, you can easily find those recently modified files and the specific content within the data.
Look for the right clues
When you locate such files that you believe are infected, take a close look for some common syntax used by the hackers while inserting a virus into your website. Always make sure that you look for the following PHP code snippets; error_reporting(), globals, shell_exec, gzinflate, fromCharCode, base64_decode, eval.
All of these codes represent countless functions used by the attackers but are present in several PHP attacks.
Remove the Virus
Once you have discovered the corrupt files, you must remove them permanently to make your website virus-free. It is possible to remove the virus manually, but it is recommended that you use a website scanner for accuracy and speed.
As a website scanner can automatically detect the virus and eliminate it immediately. Also, it uses a file transfer protocol scan to clean, inspect, and download website files. Then it instantly uploads those files to the host server without disturbing the user experience.
Also there some other ways that can help you to remove the virus from your website:
To manually remove a virus from your website, you must use the following steps:
- Log in to your server via SSH or SFTP.
- Create a backup of your website before making any changes.
- Identify the recently modified files.
- Confirm the date of the modifications with the user who changed them.
- Restore the suspicious files.
- Open any premium or custom file using a text editor.
- Remove any malicious code from those custom files.
- Then check if your site is in working condition after making changes.
Conclusion
Defending a website against viruses is a hard effort for every website owner. To minimize such risk, you must focus on the vulnerabilities are try to fix them quickly. Read this article to know how to remove a virus from your website.
How to check if website is blacklisted?
