Website Malware Removal
If you’re running a business website, then your Plan A should always be to stop malware from getting onto it in the first place. Sadly, there are never any guarantees that your Plan A will succeed. This means that you also need a Plan B. In other words, you also need to know how to remove malware from your website. Here is a guide to help.
How to remove malware from your website
Although there are all kinds of different forms of malware floating around in the wild, the steps to remove malware from your website are essentially the same. They can be roughly summarized as follows. Block access to your website. Scan your website. Decide whether to clean up your code or to reinstall your website. Clean up your administrator accounts.
Block access to your website
One of the harsh ironies of malware infestations is that you may, reasonably, see yourself as the victim, but if the malware on your systems causes problems for third-parties, then you may be the one who finds yourself in legal trouble (while the initial perpetrators often go free).
The quicker you block access to your site, the less likely it is that you will cause damage to other people. Also, you want to stop the hackers from coming back to cause more damage while you are in the process of repairing what they have already done.
Scan your website
You can use online vulnerability scanners for free on an ad hoc basis. It is, however, best to take a malware attack as a sign that you need to up your security game and invest in a website vulnerability scanner to give your website constant protection 24/7/365. Different website vulnerability scanners will have different functions but any decent one should include an anti-malware scanner and a website applications firewall.
Decide whether to clean up your code or to reinstall your website
Sadly, you cannot assume that removing the malware will be the end of your problems. Sometimes hackers inject sites with malware just to cause mischief. Many times, however, they’ll use malware to open up a website enough for them to get a toehold into it and then start increasing their access to your website by changing its underlying coding.
This reality means that once the initial scan is complete, you have a decision to make. You can either go through your website manually (or have someone do it for you) and purge whatever malicious code has been left behind or you can pull the plug and do a fresh install.
If you go through the site manually, then you have to be sure not only that you get all malicious code but also that you avoid breaking any genuine code. This requires skill and confidence and experience generally helps. On the other hand, this approach allows you to keep any customizations you have made to your website.
If you recreate your site from scratch, then you will be guaranteed to use clean code, but you will lose any customizations you have made to your site. You can recreate these but only if you remember to back up (and if necessary clean) any third-party add-ons you had created to enable them.
It’s also advisable to make sure that you have backed-up all of your unique content before you purge it. This is particularly true of images as they can be easily lost and expensive to recreate.
In short, the more heavily customized your website is, the more you should lean towards cleaning it up and vice versa.
Clean up your administrator accounts
Check your list of administrator accounts and make sure that you can positively identify everyone on the list as a valid administrator. If you can’t then just delete the account. If it does turn out to be someone internal, then you need to investigate why they were given access without a record being made.
Once this has been done, have all your administrators change their passwords. If an administrator isn’t there, then downgrade them to a regular user (or revoke the account) until they are and you can have them change their password.
Now is a good time to review the use of administrator accounts in general and in particular to check what measures are in place to enforce safe usage practices. For example, are you implementing strong-password policies and two-factor authentication? Are you blocking users after excessive failed login attempts? Are you logging them out automatically if they spend too long idle?
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Removal
Security stack layer 1
Malware Detect & Removal
Our malware detection scanning, preventive methods and removal enables you to take a proactive approach to protect the business and brand reputation from malware attacks and infections.
- Unsuspecting websites get infected with malicious code.
- Continuous website monitoring to detect any incidents.
- Identify and remediate the cause to hardening your websites.
Comodo cWatch Web can identify malware, provide the tools and methods to remove it, and help to prevent future malware attacks at the edge before it hits the network, included as a paid member.
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Response
Security stack layer 5
Cyber Security Operations Center
Our exclusive C.S.O.C. is staffed with certified security analysts to monitor, assess and defend websites, applications, databases, data centers, servers, networks, desktops and other endpoints.
- 24 / 7 / 365 security monitoring using state-of-the-art tech.
- Engage clients of complex threats to resolve the issue.
- Real-time web traffic monitoring and proactive incident fixes.
C.S.O.C. checks for threats, identifies and analysis then performs the necessary actions to resolve the issue while offloading costs of in-house experts by using stack layer 3 to handle the heavy lifting.
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Intelligence
Security stack layer 3
Security Information • Event Management
S.I.E.M. collects logs and events the network traffic and web assets, security devices, operating systems, applications, databases, and reviews the vulnerabilities using artificial intelligence to process.
- Reduces billions of events into prioritized threats real-time.
- Identifies changes in network behavior with activity baselines.
- Flows data searches in real-time streaming or historical mode.
S.I.E.M. senses and tracks significant threats to links to all online supporting data and context for easier investigation. While anomaly detection to identify changes associated with the network safety.
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Prevention
Security stack layer 4
Web Application Firewall
W.A.F. by Comodo eliminates application vulnerabilities to protect websites and web applications against advanced attacks including Denial-of-Service (DDoS), SQL Injection and Cross-Site Scripting.
- Destroys malicious requests and thwart hack attempts.
- Protection to account registration forms and login pages.
- Malicious bots and brute force attacks are block and patched.
Combined with malware scanning, vulnerability scanning and automatic virtual patching and hardening engines provides robust security is fully managed for Comodo cWatch Web customers.
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Performance
Security stack layer 2
Add a network of globally distributed servers designed to boost the speed for websites and web applications by transferring content to your user based on their proximity to the nearest CDN web server.
- Proven to increase search engine rankings and site scores.
- 29 worldwide CDN node locations to reach your users.
- Save your bandwidth by leveraging CDN browser caching.
CDN serves your users your website content with virtually unlimited capacity. Giving you the freedom to focus less on site maintenance, more on scaling the uptime of your traffic and target audience.
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Compliance
Security stack layer 6
Payment Card Industry • Data Security Standard
PCI • DSS ensures that your customers' cardholder info is kept secure from security breaches through a meticulous scan of your network and applications to identify and fix security vulnerabilities.
- Simple and automated way to stay compliant with PCI • DSS.
- Pass the requirements for the 12 points PCI • DSS standard.
- Schedule on-demand PCI scans to report quarterly results.
Establishes and implements a firewall, hardens your environment, disables unnecessary services & configures system parameters to prevent misuse, ensures system audit components are protected.
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