6 ways a website can be infected with a virus

When you discover a virus on your website for the first time, is the first question you will ask not “How did I manage to get my website infected?”. That is a good question though, but you have to know the pitfalls and ways on the internet that make a website get infected with a virus.

Viruses on the website do not appear from nowhere. Malicious code is a result of a hacker’s attack. This means that your website or your hosting account was hacked and infected. You may see our expert guide on how to remove viruses on your website via cPanel

In this article, I will show you top 6 common ways a website can get infected with a virus.

Without wasting much time, let us get started.

6 ways a website can be infected with a virus

1.Vulnerable scripts on the website

That is a common situation. Vulnerabilities are scripts that allow hackers to crawl into the control panel of the website.

To avoid this you should update your CMS regularly. There is no difference which CMS you are using. Be attentive and ensure that all released patches and updates were installed. Otherwise, you leave a possibility for hackers and bots to easily get an access to your website’s files, database or admin panel.

Hackers know about the vulnerabilities of all the popular content management systems pretty fast, and thieves do not wait long to use that knowledge since it gives them an access to a dozens of websites. But even custom content management systems are frequently becoming victims because usually they are developed without much thought about safety.

There are three main ways hackers can use said vulnerabilities:

• Backdoors and web-shells upload
• Implantation of the virus into the website database
• Addition or removal of administrators, theft of access to the administrator’s panel

As a result, we will have viruses on the website. And those viruses may be the reason why the website is blacklisted by Google.

2. Vulnerable plugins, templates and themes

A lot of website owners may use free plugins and templates instead of legit ones. But almost every free copy of a theme or a template will contain a web-shell, backdoor, malicious script or any other “present” that a hacker left there.

If you are not experienced enough to clean the free template or plugin, the smart thing is to avoid them. Trust us, website cleanup and repair will cost much more than a new theme. Don’t let free templates and plugins lure you to major problems.

3. Password guessing

This type of hacking is called brute-force attack. In this case, a hacker tries different password combinations to guess the correct password. This method is a huge threat to weak and unreliable passwords.

When the system asks a user to create a password, most users tends to  create trivial combinations. Don’t think that your pet’s name is a good password. The most popular password was “Password1”. Obviously, users were much more worried about their comfort rather than the security of their website. You may see our guide on how hackers use WordPress database upgrade email to hack websites.

4. Interception or theft of FTP accesses

Working with accesses over an unsecure channel is a bad idea. While connected via FTP, your login and password are shown that way thieves can steal this data easily. It’s better to use secure channels while using email, visiting other websites and working via FTP.

5. Hacked server or hosting

One of the reasons why viruses appeared on the website is server or hosting hack. Here are two main things that can lead to such a problem:

• “Handmade hosting”. There are plenty of hostings in the Internet that offer their services. And among them you can meet so called “handmade hostings”. Owners of such hostings simply resell services of a bigger hosting companies. Often, those owners lack experience and have no idea how to administrate their hosting safely. They do not care about software updates, creating backups of the hosted websites. They don’t really care about websites that use their cervices. That’s why such hostings become easy prey for hackers. Thieves can hack the websites easily. And in this case it’s useless to try and repair your website. The only option is switching to a different hosting company.
• Websites are hosted unsafely. You should understand that if you place several websites on one hosting account, infected website will infect the rest of the websites. In this case you will need to scan and repair all of the websites instead of dealing only the hacked one. And we are sure you don’t want to spend so much time and money on it, right?

6. A dishonest developer

Not every freelancer is decent. Sometimes a dishonest developer may leave some codes (backdoors) in your website while developing it to have  access to it in future. Then they can use your website to earn money with the help displaying Ads, putting affiliate links, Trustlink, Mainlink, Sape etc.

You may see our guide on what viruses do to a website.

Conclusion

Every experienced specialist knows that there is no foolproof option that will protect your website forever. That’s why it is better to cooperate with  a professional web developer like us at Fastknowers Technologies Ltd to ensure that your site won’t be hacked.

Our team will clear, repair and protect your website from hacker attacks. For more information, please contact us.

Hope this article has helped you know the top 6 ways a website can be infected with a virus. If you know that this article has helped you, you may subscribe to my YouTube channel for more updates. You can also find me on Facebook.