From malware and vulnerability scans to real-time security updates, the SiteLock WordPress Plugin provides complete website security management without ever having to leave WordPress. In December 2017, the SiteLock WordPress Plugin was updated to v4.0.4. For those of you already using the plugin, you can update your version within your WordPress Dashboard. For newbies, you can download and install the plugin here.
Read the WP Buffs review about SiteLock.
It can come as quite a surprise when a site owner is notified that their site has been compromised with malware. After the shock wears off, and the immediate impact understood, it’s important to take stock of what has actually happened behind the scenes and then clean it up. The best advice anyone can give you is to make frequent, downloaded backups of your site in the event something happens to the live version so that the clean backup can replace the live, hacked version.
But what if there is no clean, viable backup available? In a world where websites have hundreds, if not thousands of files, how can any one person go about cleaning out an infection in just a small number of those files?
A special thank you to Yvonne Conway-Williams for her time and participation in the interview for this article.
At a recent WordCamp, I met Yvonne Conway-Williams, a social media marketing expert and front-end web developer. She approached our sponsor booth inquiring about website security. That’s when she said; “I wish I had found SiteLock two years earlier.” Struck by the comment, I asked her what had happened. Conway-Williams shared that on January 30, 2015, she and her husband returned home from a long day to find her client’s website, a local car club, defaced. Instead of her client’s homepage, the website featured a front page promoting and recruiting for ISIS, the terrorist organization.
When you think of websites being infected with malware, what types of sites come to mind? Pharmaceutical sites, porn sites or sites that bombard you with pop-up ads? While these sites could very well be malicious, you’re actually more likely to run into malware while visiting one of your typical, everyday e-commerce or news sites. Today, 75 percent of legitimate websites are at risk of malware. Malware, also known as malicious software, is designed to harm a website and its visitors.
A recent article reported that WordPress.com is moving to enable HTTPS by default on all of its 600,000 hosted sites. This is a huge security win for WordPress.com users and the Internet at large. It sets a high security bar for other entities to strive for, and of course helps protect users and visitors from prying eyes.
If you’re a WordPress.com user, one way to take advantage of WordPress.com’s exemplary efforts is to go further and enhance the security of your WP.com site with protection services.
When talking with customers whose website have been hacked, our support teams often hear the question, ‘Why was my website hacked?’ Getting hacked is a violation. It is a violation of a company’s web properties, or the personal violation of someone’s small business or specialty site. Having the hard work of web development undone, even temporarily, is a difficult experience and SiteLock strives to restore that work as quickly as possible. Our teams are dedicated to this.
This week we’re here to reassure readers that the majority of compromises are not targeted attacks. We will discuss how and why bad actors attack sites, and how to avoid becoming another line in an attacker’s text file of owned sites.
Websites are fish in the sea of the Internet and get caught up in the scanning nets of malicious actors.
In our last post, we introduced you to the new automatic malware scanner SiteLock is offering to its customers, SiteLock Secure Malware Alert and Removal Tool (SMART). We discussed the setup and configuration of the scanning system. Now, we’re going to show you the tool’s dashboard and reporting options that detect and display any malicious pieces of code that are hidden in your website.
Now that SMART has been configured and has started scanning your website files, it’s time to take a look at the results. Before we do, there are a few things about the interface you should know about:
SiteLock is proud to present our latest feature in our dashboard, a malware scanner that not only finds the malicious code in your website but can also automatically remove it. This new scanning tool is called SiteLock Malware Automated Removal Tool, or SMART.
SMART has the ability to use the (S)FTP credentials for your website to connect to your hosting server and scan the files hard-coded in your site for malicious scripts, viruses, and other unwarranted code detected on your site.
At your request, or automatically, SMART can even remove some of the malicious code from your website and send the clean version back into place. With this tool, you can stay protected from hackers who try to break into your website’s information.
In this blog post, we’re going to discuss setting up and configuring SMART. It is essential that the configuration is set appropriately in order for the malware scanner to be able to effectively monitor for malware, and clean it from infections.
SiteLock has recently upgraded its scanner to better utilize Google blacklist data. It makes use of the newest version of the SafeBrowsing API by Google, to scan and detect links to malware and phishing on websites. This update also includes the detection of specific domains on Google’s malware/phishing lists. If your website has been blacklisted by Google for containing links to any of these blacklisted domains, SiteLock now provides comprehensive steps to help you quickly remedy the situation so you’re back in the green in no time.
If your domain or a page on your site has been blacklisted as “malicious,” here are some steps you can take to help quickly get your domain removed from the list:
