How to strength­en your website’s malware pro­tec­tion

Websites are just as vul­ner­a­ble to malware as PCs are. Cy­ber­crim­i­nals use this to their advantage by infecting websites with malicious software, which then spreads over the whole site. What usually happens is that harmful scripts are in­te­grat­ed into the original code of the website and aren’t im­me­di­ate­ly no­tice­able to the user. The website seems to work as requested, but in reality it is actually func­tion­ing as an in­stru­ment for hackers with the help of cross-site scripting (XSS).

How can malware pro­tec­tion best practices keep a website safe? And what measures help if the website has already been infected with malware?

What are some malware pro­tec­tion best practices?

To minimize the risk of your web project being infected with malware, there are several useful tools and codes of conduct you can follow. Hackers most often gain access to web projects because of insecure passwords, infected work PCs, out-of-date ap­pli­ca­tions or an over­crowd­ed, confusing disk space. If you want complete pro­tec­tion against malware, you should do the following:

Secure logins

Passwords play an important role in your web project. By using a strong password, you make it more difficult for criminals to access your website. For optimal malware pro­tec­tion, you should set up and use two-factor au­then­ti­ca­tion when logging into the backend, for example.

Secure data trans­mis­sion

When it comes to malware pro­tec­tion, it is essential that any kind of data transfer is encrypted. It doesn’t matter whether you want to transfer data between browser and website or files to the disk space. The protocol you need for this is TLS or SSL, which has been a mandatory protocol for all websites re­quest­ing personal in­for­ma­tion since 2018. If your web project is connected to a valid SSL cer­tifi­cate, browsers can com­mu­ni­cate with the pages of your web ap­pli­ca­tion via HTTPS. It is also possible to establish secure con­nec­tions to the website based on SFTP. This makes it difficult for criminals to access all important trans­mis­sion channels.

Organize disk space

Outdated files and ap­pli­ca­tions whose security standards have expired or contain known vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties make it easy for malware to attack and is one of the most common ways that such attacks occur. This is why it’s extremely important to keep your disk space tidy. This is the only way to keep track of whether you may need to replace or com­plete­ly remove certain documents and software.

Update software

When hosting a web project, it is often not that easy or fun to keep all the ap­pli­ca­tions you use up to date. If you are satisfied with the current version of the operating system you’re using, there is no need to upgrade it. Often with content man­age­ment systems, there are good reasons for reverting to an older version. It could be because you are working with certain ex­ten­sions or because migration to a newer version involves too much effort.

Still, it is important that you keep the validity of your ap­pli­ca­tions (also pro­gram­ming languages, frame­works, etc.) in mind. When a version is outdated and no longer receiving any security support, it makes sense to update the software so your web project doesn’t fall victim to security vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties. Such updates are essential for good malware pro­tec­tion.

Malware scanner

Even with the best hosting and malware pro­tec­tion, you can’t com­plete­ly rule out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of malicious software getting onto the web server. This is why you should take advantage of pro­fes­sion­al security solutions and fre­quent­ly scan your devices as well as your website for malware.

If you host your web project with IONOS, you can scan up to 500 subpages for malware every day with Site Scan + Repair. You can also use the tool to check WordPress for malware, au­to­mat­i­cal­ly remove malware, and fix vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in WordPress, Drupal and Joomla.

Backups

Backing up your web project does not provide malware pro­tec­tion, but it can save you time and effort in case you have to restore the website after it has been infected. Storing these backups sep­a­rate­ly doesn’t take much effort and ensures you’re on the safe side.

How to delete malware from an infected website

As soon as you notice that your website is infected you should remove the malware as quickly as possible. It is your duty as an operator to act quickly if you find yourself in such a situation. However, if you get rid of the malware but don’t find out how it infected your system, it won’t be long until your website is under siege again. It’s best to play it safe and hire experts to properly clean up your website.

If you have detected an infection on your website despite having fully working malware pro­tec­tion, you should do the following:

1. Disable your website to limit the damage until the problem is fixed. Use bridging solutions like WordPress Main­te­nance Mode to inform your visitors about the temporary un­avail­abil­i­ty.
2. Contact your hosting provider and co­or­di­nate with them on how to proceed.
3. Check all user accounts for in­con­sis­ten­cies (for example, new accounts that you know you didn’t create yourself) and change all passwords for users and ad­min­is­tra­tors.
4. Try to determine all the sources of damage to work out how much harm has been caused.
5. Get rid of all spam, malware and malicious code on your website using ap­pro­pri­ate tools.
6. Use any backups you’ve created to restore lost files or retrieve an undamaged version of your web project.
7. Update all installed software packages or reinstall the important programs you use.
8. After the cleanup, change all passwords again.