How Essential Is Website Malware Detection For Your Organization?

By Author: kedar naik
Total Articles: 8
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A hacked website infected with malware often gets blacklisted by Google, and it is removed from search domains. Getting it fixed is easy, but not before your search rankings fall and your reputation is affected. This risk makes website malware detection an extreme necessity because an unprotected website is a massive risk to a company and its clients.

What is Website Malware?

According to Wikipedia, "Malware (a portmanteau for malicious software) is any software intentionally designed to cause damage to a computer, server, client, or computer network."
Often associated with computers, malware is also used to attack and infect websites. It is a major cyber threat that has the power to damage your website and business reputation. There are almost a million malware threats created every day. To keep your website safe, it is essential to stay ahead of cyber hackers while familiarizing yourself with how malware can harm your site, and can you prevent it.

How does it affect your website?

There are numerous ways malware can affect your website.

Change the look of your website.

Website ...
... defacement enables cyber hackers to replace the hosted website content with one of their own messages, often promoting a political, social or religious agenda. This attack can offend your website visitors and turn them away, thereby reducing your traffic significantly.

Damage your SEO

Working on your website is a tedious yet effective task to ensure enhanced visibility of your web pages and increase traffic. Malware can cause significant damage to your website's SEO activities. Malware infecting your website replaces your outbound links so that they navigate to domains the cyber hackers want to boost. Considered as a 'blackhat' approach for link building, it gives the sites a quick boost but can also negatively impact the SEO. It is often difficult to detect unless the outbound links are inspected from time to time.

Malvertising

Malvertising is the process of spreading malware across your website through online advertising. It spreads when users click on an ad or through a "drive-by" download, and it automatically infects the visitor while visiting the site. It involves cyber hackers injecting malicious advertisements into legitimate online advertising networks, thereby distributing the ad across thousands of websites at a time. Malvertising enables malefactors to accelerate their attack to users who might not see the ads, because of firewalls, or other safety precautions.

Force Unauthorized Redirects

Several types of malware redirect your website visitors to other websites. Also, in some cases, users may be redirected to an unsecured copy of your website by the malicious code to access their personal data. Other variants of this malware, direct users to other websites to get more traffic.

Grant site access to cyber hackers

Backdoors are a kind of malware that serves as an entry point for cyber hackers, thus allowing them to attain and maintain constant access to your website. Your sensitive customer data is easily compromised, site appearance altered, among other harmful activities. Backdoor files are quite sophisticated and can hence go undetected.

How can you protect against malware?

They say a stitch in time saves nine. So it is in this case, website malware detection is essential to protect your website from all the above activities and many more that cause damage to your organization. There are many website malware tools and services available that can scan and isolate the infection.

Even though website malware detection services are plenty, you must be wary before choosing them not further to enhance the risk. Preventing malware infections is cost-effective and a crucial investment for the success of your website.