image courtesy of boom shadow.net
Site administrators and bloggers, like me, need also to worry of the malware freeness of our sites, not only of our computer. I remember a few months back, two of my sites became a launching pad of a phishing attack when someone took advantage of the timthumb vulnerability. I came to know about the attack thru Google Webmaster Tools.
Marta Janus, Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab, gave us the tell tale signs when our websites or blogs has become a center for malware attack. Among the most obvious ones are:
- Visitors complain that your website is blocked by the browser or security software
- Your website is blacklisted by Google or added to some other database of malicious URLs
- There is a significant change in traffic and/or drop in search engine rankings
- Your blog doesn’t work properly, displays errors and warnings; and
- After visiting your blog, your device shows strange behavior.
To add that, observing these basic security practice will spare us the stress and effort of disinfecting our site from the attack.
- Keep your CMS and plug-ins up to date
- Use webmaster tools, like the one of Google
- Back-up your content
- Keep your device secure
- And frequently change your password