Website Security Issues and Fixes

Over this last week, my websites attracted malware and/or viruses unbenownst to me or my web host.

It was not until I inquired about my server-based email not going out to those I was emailing.  Incoming emails continued to come in.

Once I contacted my webhost, they told me my websites had been sending out spam and that is why the out-going email was not working. They had shut down all SMTP servers for me to prevent the spam going out.  Unfortunately, it halted my GOOD emails from going out too.

So that started a search for the malware.

Now here is how this works.

Your web host is not responsible for malware and hackers coming in from "the front end", i.e. your websites.  This includes your WordPress blog.  

The web host is only responsible for fending off attacks from "the back end", i.e. the servers, storage and networks that they use to attach your site to the internet via their infrastructure.  

In other words, they protect the back end and YOU as the user are responsible for the front end.

So that sent me on a search for good malware & virus protection as well as detection if it did get through.

So for the protection side I found a company called Site Lock to scan my website files daily with their detection equipment and clean any malware or viruses found.  https://www.sitelock.com/ is their site.

SiteLock also did an initial scan of all files to detect anything already embedded.  They found two WordPress installs that had malware/virus's embedded.  Thank goodness that got all cleaned up.

I also found a good WordPress plugin called Word Fence that monitors your WordPress install for malware and viruses.  It's free and also has a paid upgrade which I did not take since I had the SiteLock folks on contract as well.  You can see the Word Fence site at http://www.WordFence.com/

The main reason I got SiteLock was that I have lots of domains and WordPress installs.

Those are not the only protection schemes or companies out there of course… just the ones I found and thought would do good work.

Lesson learned:  Although WordPress is an easy "one click install," it comes with some amount of responsibility on your part to configure it correctly.  This includes protecting it (and your web host) from malware & viruses.  This will go into my next course on WordPress!

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Fred
The Submarine Guy
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Fred@SubmarineGuy.com