Find, eliminate and prevent malware on your website or server
Malware takes many forms including ads, unexplained links, and pop-ups, but some malware may have no noticeable effect.
Your best defense against malware is to stay on top of third-party application fixes and using complex passwords.
We cannot help you remove malware from your site or server. Consider taking your site offline immediately to prevent infecting visitors, and take action quickly to identify / remove malware.
Identify malware
If you think you are having a problem with malware, change any passwords that would be affected such as FTP, database or control panel passwords. Then use the guidelines below to identify the problem.
NOTE: Always use a virtual machine to test for malware to avoid infecting your computer. To get accurate results, test your code currently on your site, not your backup files.
Check online for malware tools. Review sites such as Badware Stop and antiphishing.org also have information on current known issues.
Check the Google SafeBrowsing diagnostic. Visit http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=www.example.com and replace www.example.com with your site.
Test any downloadable software displayed on your site. Even though you developed the software, it may have been modified by a hacker.
Test all the links on your site. Make sure they don't link to sites that contain malware.
Search for unknown links or links to executables such as. EXE ,. .bat ,. Cmd ,. SCR, or. Pif.
Use link checker software to analyze all the links in your code.
Check the ads on your site. Malware can be distributed through advertisements on your site. Identify these with link checker software to see if others have had similar issues.
Analyze all links with a link checker.
Watch out for pirate attacks. Injection (to insert code or executables into your web pages) is a common method of hacking that exploits a security vulnerability in order to introduce malicious code, so look for code you don't have. even added.
Look for invisible images. They are virtually invisible due to their size, and are usually placed at the bottom or top of the source code. Search for iframe tags with height = "0" width = "0".
Look for the strange code. A common way to hide malware is to hide it by encoding or encrypting it:
Search for strings of percent signs (%), followed by two characters (for example %%% ww xx yy) or \ u followed by 4 characters (for example \ u9900 \ u1212 \ u8879).
The encrypted code is harder to find, as there are no frozen patterns. Most web syntax is based on English words, so most of your code should be somewhat readable. Look for large sections of code that are completely unintelligible blocks of letters, numbers and symbols.
Upload your site's files to a virtual machine and scan it using antivirus and anti-spyware software.
NOTE: Most people focus on hacking HTML code, but malware can also be included in other types of files such as executables, JavaScript files, PDFs or even images, if hacker gets access. to your site.
Remove Malware
If you find out that you have the malware, use these suggestions to remove it from your site.
Remove all links to malicious sites from your site
Remove infected software.
Remove malware infected by ads. If you are using an ad network, you might need to remove all ads from the network until you are certain the network is clear. You can also contact your ad provider.
Edit or delete user-generated messages where malware is present.
If you think your site has been hacked, use the guidelines below to troubleshoot and get back on line.
Take the site offline to avoid putting site visitors and customers at risk.
Remove all offending code.
Correct underlying security vulnerabilities to prevent future attacks.
Check and remove "back doors"
