Solving Security Issues For Small Sites

If you have pages in another language or inserts of other people’s products, and so on, the verdict is simple – your site has been hacked. But how to find out about the infection before customer claims and avoid losses? A development company (https://devoxsoftware.com/technology/java-development-company/) will help you develop the site, but due to improper handling of the security system, the work of programmers may be in vain. After all, the reputation suffers foremost. If the client visited the first time, and your site was marked as malicious, he is unlikely to visit the second time. To avoid this, you need to check the site for viruses and treat it in time.

Where to look for site infection markers?

First, you need to check if there is malicious code and activity on your site or not. This can be done in several ways.

Through the webmaster panel

You need to check the search engine webmaster panel. In the Security tab, in case of threats, a message will appear about blocking the site.

Through the provider

If suspicious activity is detected, the provider may send a notification or block your site. Messages about spamming, attacks, abuse, etc. may indicate the presence of a virus on your site. Providers also block mining if it is detected.

Website redirects to an unknown resource

A simple check of the main URLs of the site will also help to identify the presence of threats. When an incomprehensible redirect appears, you can confidently say that the site is infected.

Big mail queue

Large mail queue When your site starts sending out emails that shouldn’t be, your site is infected. If there are too many messages in the mail queue, or an unscheduled distribution occurs, then an additional check is needed. The queue can be checked by online checkers.

Monitoring by online checkers

It’s good that you found the problem yourself. It’s bad when you find out about it from disgruntled customers or a provider. Therefore, it is important to check the site for threats constantly. In a simple version, this can be done by online checkers. For example, a service from Google that performs static checks, blacklist checks, and much more.

Typical problems with viruses on websites

Viruses show up sooner or later. Typical problems that viruses create on the site:

• Spamming – Often, hacking occurs for the mass distribution of spam using other people’s resources. This threatens to block IP and get blacklisted.
• URL forgery – There is an attraction of traffic to other people’s sites by redirecting to other people’s stores, sites, and goods. There are problems with SEO. The site of the victim, at the same time, falls in the ranking, and the final site rises. Links are not always easy to spot, especially when the site is large. Sometimes, for example, a virus adds banners or replaces some links.
• Use as a source for DDoS attacks – The server is infected, and it acts like a zombie server for various kinds of attacks on other resources. With such activity, the server may be blocked by the provider. For this reason, VPS is used to attack web resources.

How to cure a website of viruses?

A complete solution to the problem of site infection can be corrected by a security specialist. You can also use services that carry out auto-restoration of the site. In any case, the main point is to find the vulnerability and prevent re-infection.

Locally

To solve problems, it is possible to involve a security specialist. He, having the appropriate qualifications, will find the vulnerabilities through which the hack was made, and eliminate them.

Some site owners with insufficient qualifications tend to think that if the antivirus checked the site and removed the viruses, then everything is OK now. They draw an analogy with the OS of a conventional computer. But the problem is that the vulnerability with which the site was hacked remains. Therefore, hacking is repeated soon.

Therefore, a web professional, in addition to finding scripts, must also eliminate the vulnerability through which the virus entered the system. You can, of course, update the system, but you need to fix the code that causes the problem in any case.

A security specialist costs $50-300, depending on the complexity of the site.

External Services

SiteLock is a service for automatic search and removal of viruses and site repair. In situations where automatic removal is not possible, you must manually check the website files for viruses and fix the problem.

Conclusion

Sites of different sizes have different needs, different problems, and, accordingly, different solutions. Enterprise characters have specific problems. It is more difficult to protect customer data, as many people work with them and the data is hunted. And small sites contain little personal data and are usually hacked by automatic systems. They rarely get a focused attack. At the same time, reputational risks are even more critical for a small site. Therefore, the security of small sites should be approached with the same responsibility as for an enterprise.