You may have heard that you should get a website scanner to look for threats on your website. But what does a website scanner do? What kind of threats does it look for? In this blog, we’ll review the SiteLock website scanning capabilities and the five different daily scans it performs to ensure your website is safe from every angle.
A website scanner is a tool that reviews your website for things that shouldn’t be there. The SiteLock scanner looks for website malware, vulnerabilities, spam, and other security issues in your hosting environment.
Beyond finding these threats, there are other benefits to having SiteLock review your site.
SiteLock uses five different scans to review your website for threats.
With our signature malware scan, SiteLock reviews your site for known malware on a daily basis. If any malware is found, you’ll be notified immediately. The SiteLock database of over 10 million malicious signatures is updated all day, every day, so you’ll always be protected from the latest threats.
By staying one step ahead of malware, you’ll be protecting your site and its visitors from attacks such as ransomware, SEO spam, and defacement, just to name a few. Daily malware scans and alerts mean you’ll always know if an infection has been found and removed from your site.
The spam scan looks for your domain name and IP address on spam databases every day. Emails from flagged sites are sent to recipients’ spam folders, which can be frustrating to customers or email list subscribers. If your site has been flagged, you’ll be alerted immediately. Our scan goes a step further and checks to see if your site has been hit with a “bad neighbor” block, which occurs if your site shares a server with a flagged site. This scan ensures that you’ll know whether or not your site is flagged for spam, so that you can make sure your site is safe and your emails are going through.
This scan looks for misconfigurations, such as open ports on your server. Ports unintentionally left open can be easy entryways for cybercriminals. To help mitigate these potential threats, our network scan reviews your site daily. You’ll be informed of any potentially vulnerable server configurations, allowing you to contact your host and resolve the issue.
As the name suggests, the application scan looks for vulnerabilities in a server’s core applications – meaning the actual server structure your site is built on. Every month, this scan reviews your server’s operating system, database, and language version, such as PHP or MySQL. If any security issues are found, you’ll be notified so that you can resolve them with your hosting provider.
This daily scan looks for two of the most common vulnerabilities found in website applications: XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) and SQLi (SQL Injection) attacks. Both of these attacks allow cybercriminals to gain unauthorized access to sites by injecting malicious script into unprotected form fields, such as a login field or contact form. Preventing SQLi keeps spammy posts off your site, safeguards your visitors’ information, and prevents cybercriminals from gaining full control of your site. By preventing XSS, this scan stops the distribution of malicious content, session hijacking, and theft of session data. You’ll be notified as soon as these vulnerabilities are found.
A thorough website scan ensures your site runs smoothly and is free of malware, spam, common vulnerabilities, and server security issues. And if any issues do arise, you’ll always be in the know. And, the SiteLock 24/7/365 US-based customer support is always available to help. In fact, it’s one of the reasons customers love SiteLock: ” I give SiteLock my stamp of approval for the company’s fast and friendly customer service, automated security solutions, and free website risk assessments,” says Maddy Osman of the-blogsmith.com.
To get our complete website scanner and other website security solutions, check out our plans and pricing or contact our team today.