What Is Malware and How Can It Affect My Website?
Malware is a major cyber threat that can harm your website or company significantly. When one million new malware threats are generated every day, how can you keep your website safe? By familiarizing yourself with how malware can affect your site and what you can do to avoid it, you can easily keep one step ahead of cybercriminals.
What IS malware?
Software developed for malicious purposes is malware. Although computers are generally associated with this, malware can also be used to target websites and corrupt them.
How malware affects your website?
Malware for websites will…
Adjust your site’s appearance.
Defacements allow cybercriminals to substitute their own message for the content of your website, which often promotes a political or religious agenda. By insulting them with the surprising message and/or stopping them from fully accessing your website, this attack may turn visitors away. In Q2 2018 alone, defaults made up 14 percent of incidents, making them one of the most popular and identifiable forms of malware.
Hide in advertisements.
Malvertising spreads malware by prompting users to click on an ad, or by installing a drive-by, which infects a visitor automatically when they visit the web. In an advertisement, cybercriminals may either inject malicious code or upload their own malicious ad to an ad network that distributes the ad through millions of websites at a time.
Send your visitors to other (usually malicious) sites
You have been affected by a malicious redirection of visitors to your site who are redirected to another site, especially one that looks suspicious. Redirects are one of the more common cyberattacks, accounting for 17 percent of all malware infections, according to SiteLock data.
Grant cybercriminals access to your site.
Backdoors are a form of malware that acts as an entry point for cybercriminals, enabling them to gain and retain continuous access to your web, true to their name. Cybercriminals can reveal confidential consumer data with access to your website, change the appearance of your site, and more. As studies show that they are sophisticated enough to go undetected, you might not find a backdoor file, but they are popular with cybercriminals. In Q2 2018, 43 percent of compromised websites had at least one backdoor file.
Place spam content on your site
Both signs of SEO (search engine optimization) spam are odd links or comments unexpectedly appearing on your website or a major and unexpected loss of traffic.
To help websites perform well in search results, SEO spam takes advantage of two techniques: the use of specific search words on a web page and the acquisition of links from outside sources. Cybercriminals can cause a drop in your site’s search rankings by uploading hundreds or thousands of files containing malicious backlinks and unrelated keywords into your site, resulting in a dramatic drop in website visits.
Flag your site with a warning and remove it from search results.
In an attempt to prevent users from accessing them, Google and other popular search engines scan websites for malware and can delete compromised pages from search results. Blacklisting is known as this method. In order to protect visitors from malicious content, search engines can also put an alert on blacklisted pages. The alert lets tourists know and stops them from accessing the site from becoming contaminated. This would not only cause your traffic to decrease but your site will be distrusted by those tourists and never return.
Consequences of website malware
If your website is infected with malware, your credibility, website traffic, and/or sales would likely take a hit. On your site, suspicious activity or signs of malware could make your site appear untrustworthy, damage your reputation, and deter visitors from coming back. In reality, 65% of online shoppers who have stolen their personal information refuse to return to the website where their data has been compromised, a loss that many websites and corporations can not afford.
Fortunately, it is cheap, fast, and a good investment in the success of your website to prevent malware infections.
How to prevent website malware?
You can prevent website malware by:
Vulnerability Preventing. Vulnerabilities are weak points in the code of the website that can be abused to target a website, and by using bots, cybercriminals can instantly locate them.
Vulnerabilities can be prevented by:
Installing updates and patches promptly.. Updating the apps and plugins as soon as patches are accessible means that bugs are patched quickly if your site is designed using a CMS such as WordPress.
Use just what you want. The more functionality a website has, the possibility of compromise increases. Reduce the risk by using only the plugins and features you really need, and uninstall everything you don’t need entirely.
Using a vulnerability detector and a framework for automatic patching. This allows the process of keeping the site updated to be automated.
Blocking automated attacks that look for vulnerabilities. As cybercriminals also use malicious bots to automatically scan for websites with vulnerabilities, no website is too small to fall victim to a cyber attack. Fortunately, with a web application firewall, these bots can be prevented (WAF).
Finding and removing malware quickly. The longer it takes to detect a cyberattack, the more it costs, so by taking care of it promptly, you can reduce the expense and harm suffered. Using a website scanner that, on a regular basis, searches for and removes established malware means that you easily catch threats.
Malware and cybercriminals don’t rest, but with website protection that doesn’t stop, you can protect against them. You can secure your site easily with SiteLock by preventing malware, bugs, and automated attacks. With 24/7/365 customer service, we’re always here for our clients, so call us at 855.378.6200 to get set up or shop online for our affordable plans.