What Is Malware and How Can It Affect My Website?

Malware is a major cyber threat that can significantly harm your website or business. How can you keep your website safe when a million new malware threats are created every day? You can easily stay one step ahead of cybercriminals by learning how malware can infect your site and what you can do to prevent it.

What is malware?
Malware is software created for malicious purposes. Although often associated with computers, malware can also be used to attack and infect websites.

How does malware affect your website?

It changes the look of your site.
It allows cybercriminals to replace the content of your website with their own messages, which often promotes a political or religious agenda. This attack can distract visitors with a shocking message and / or prevent them from accessing your website altogether. It accounted for 14% of events in Q2 2018 alone, making them one of the more common and recognizable types of malware.

It interferes with your ads.
Malicious advertising spreads malware by asking users to click on an ad or by generating a "browser notification" that automatically affects a visitor when they visit the site. Cybercriminals can add malicious code to an ad or upload it to an ad network that distributes the ad to millions of websites at once.

It sends your visitors to other (usually malicious) sites.
If visitors to your site are redirected to another site, especially one that looks suspicious, you are infected with a malicious redirect. Redirects are one of the more common cyberattacks accounting for 17% of all malware infections, according to SiteLock data.

It gives cybercriminals access to your site.
As per their name, backdoors are a type of malware that acts as entry point for cybercriminals and allows them to gain and maintain permanent access to your site. With access to your website, cybercriminals can expose sensitive customer data, change the look of your site, and more. You may not notice a backdoor vulnerability because studies show they are too sophisticated to detect, but they are popular among cybercriminals - in Q2 2018, 43 percent of infected websites had at least one backdoor vulnerability.

It can place spammy content on your site.
Unusual links or comments that pop up suddenly on your site, or a significant and sudden loss in traffic, are symptoms of SEO (search engine optimization) spam.

SEO uses two techniques used to help websites rank well in search results: using related search terms on a web page and getting links from outside sources. Cybercriminals can add hundreds or thousands of files to your site containing malicious backlinks and irrelevant keywords, causing a drop in your site's search rank, resulting in a significant drop in website visits. The most attacked sites by cybercriminals are usually wordpress sites. Why Do Cyber ​​Criminals Attack WordPress Sites? If you want to read, we have explained in our article.

By Google Your site will be flagged with a warning and removed from search results.
Google and other popular search engines examine websites for malware and remove affected sites from search results, preventing users from visiting them. This application is known as blacklist. Search engines can also issue alerts to blacklisted sites to protect visitors from malicious content. The alert lets visitors know that the site has been infected with malware and prevents them from entering the site. Not only does this cause your traffic to drop, but these visitors can distrust your site and never return. Our topic 10 ways to return declining Website traffic can help.

The consequences of website malware
If your website is infected with malware, your reputation, website traffic and / or revenue will likely take a hit. Suspicious activity or malware signs on your site can make your site appear unreliable, damage your reputation, and prevent visitors from returning. In fact, 65 percent of online shoppers whose personal information has been stolen refuse to return to the site where their information was compromised - a loss that many websites and businesses cannot afford.

Fortunately, preventing malware infections is affordable, easy, and a good investment in your website's success.

Website malware prevention
You can block website malware in the following ways:

Vulnerabilities

prevention. Vulnerabilities are weak spots in the website's code that can be used to attack a website, and cybercriminals can find them automatically using bots.

Vulnerabilities can be prevented by:

Installing updates and patches immediately. Updates of the websites provided by us are published on the management panels and you can follow them from there. Updating your software and plugins as soon as the updates are available ensures that security vulnerabilities are quickly patched.
Using only what you need. The compromise risk of a website increases the more features it has. Use only the add-ons and features you absolutely need to reduce your risk and completely remove everything you don't use.
Using a vulnerability scanner and automatic patching system. This helps automate the process of keeping your site updated.
Blocking automated attacks looking for vulnerabilities. Cybercriminals often use malicious bots to automatically search for vulnerable websites. There is no rule that no website will be hacked. Fortunately, these bots can be blocked with a web application firewall (WAF).

Find and remove malware quickly. Finding a cyberattack takes longer, but you can reduce the cost and damage by taking immediate care. Using a website scanner that searches and removes known malware on a daily basis allows you to catch threats quickly.

Malware and cybercriminals won't rest, but you can defend against them with an undelivered website security. With software.store support, you can easily protect your site by preventing malware, vulnerabilities and automatic attacks. We are always here for our customers with 24/7/365 customer support, so write to whatsapp on +90 552 487 43 19 or create a support ticket from your user account to set up us.