Identify a Malware Activity on Your Website

Website Malware Detection

A hidden Virus or Malware on a Website can harm your business reputation : Track their activity and take action.

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Free Malware Detection Consultation

Suspect a hidden virus or malware on your website? Lets track its activity and take action.

Toronto Based

Serving Canada & North America

20+ Years

Two decades of web expertise

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Billed by the minute, no surprises

Long Term Support

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Malware Check

Is there a malware on your website?

A malware on a website or on a server can be dangerous and has the ability to run an activity that can badly effect your business operations. If you are a business that relies completely on your online interface for your sales, then the chances of getting hit are higher. But in any use case, it is always a good idea to keep a check on your system for any suspicious activity.

Why Malware Infects

Why a Malware Would Infect your Website

There are a few things that you can keep a check on, to make sure your system has not been exploited or compromised. Detection of website malware can be sometimes tricky due to every evolving signature and patterns of these malware files and the way they target may vary based on use case. Before we go into how to identify a malware based activity, let understand a few reasons of why a malware would exist on your system:

To log any activity of users including any Credit Card and other personal information that would allow attackers to hijack data and either use it for self enrichment or sell it to third parties for a profit.
To send solicited / spam emails and such malwares can send thousands upon thousands of email per minute if hosting account limits are not in place.
To redirect your website visitors away to a third party website / phishing activity by redirecting to non-legit websites / redirecting to adware or spyware ridden websites.
To run some resource intensive tool on your server which may not attack your file system or data but may use your server CPU and Memory to fulfill their purpose, the purpose may be a DDos attack from your server to external servers and IPs.
To infect your website users and visitors with malware / spyware / virus.

There may be more reasons but these top reasons are good enough to understand what benefit these malwares get by intruding into your web systems.

Detect Malware

How to Detect Malware Presence

Ok, now that we know some of the main reasons why a malware may exist on your system, let go through the ways to identify a malware or a related activity.

Suspicious File Names

Look at the files in your public_html and randomly in some sub-directories, also look at the folder names in your public_html directory. Does anything look suspecious, if there are weird file names or file names that are not your core files, chances are that you need to dig into it and look at the code there to see what that code is doing or if those files need to be deleted. If you find such files, there are chances that you may need to do a complete website malware scan to detect all such files and get rid of them. Even a single malware file left behind can cause the malware to return and spread the infection.

Warning Signs

Email Activity and Resource Spikes

Increased Email Activity

If your website is sending a large number of outgoing emails all of a sudden, chances are that a malware is behind the scenes. Most of the malwares tend to send huge amount of emails which can include spam and phishing emails. If you have set unlimited email sending limits on your hosting account, it is time to cut back and set a reasonable number. If you are sending 50 emails an hour or less, a good number to limit hourly emails is 100. That will make sure that malware sends out limited number of emails and you also get the alert about the email sending limit threshold reached, prompting you to go after the logs to find the issue.

Sudden spike in CPU and Memory consumption

If your website is relatively small, and you start seeing it comsuming too many resources, there can be two reason for such an activity. One can be malware trying to run some heavy code or a DDos or similar attack on your website. DDos mitigation is something we will skip for today in this discussion and lets focus on malware related issues. If malware is causing high memory and cpu drain, then a good malware scan is the need of the hour. Also if your website is using WordPress, hiring a WordPress Malware Removal Company is going to be worth every penny.

This is just the basics of how to detect a malware activity but with ever increasing sophisticated malwares on the web, getting a professional involved to completely get rid of the malware is something every business needs.

Let us know if you need any help with your website.