There comes a time when a user tries to open a website and all they get is a malicious code alert and they often view this as a penalty or punishment without really knowing the reason behind the alert. This will draw away our potential clients from our website. Warnings like this are not favorable for any business website. You can immediately notice huge flop in traffic on analytics. It is extremely important to install web analytics applications like Google analytics to notice sudden changes in traffic. Usually, we won’t be notified about this alert by email or call. We need to find out about this alert by searching on Google or having any SEO tools that alert malicious warnings. In reality the malicious code alert appears when the search engine crawler was attacked by a spyware or a virus as it visited the page and therefore tries to warn users from opening these pages. There are many reasons why the search engines do this.
One of the reasons is when the owners’ websites have been hacked. Hackers tend to mislead the owners’ server to allow them carry out modification of the owner’s site or the information therein so that when a user tries to open the page they are automatically redirected to other malicious sites. Once the search engines discover this, they try to steer users away from these sites by popping up the malicious code alert. Even famous sites like Twitter and Gmail got hacked too. So, this is still common in the world of Internet. Cyber crime is another section that grows exponentially together with the growth of number of users online. Using a well known program that frequently updates is a wise choice. If you are planning to have a content on your site, then using famous CMS platform like WordPress can help you prevent from hackers provided you keep your version updated. The same goes to any other platforms like vBulletin, Zencart, Drupal, etc.
The other reason for this alert is when another site is hacked and then ends up affecting the content of the owners’ site. This is especially so when the owner’s JavaScript or iframes are transferred into a user’s website through the other website that has been hacked and thus it ends up being dangerous because the content in the owner’s pages depends on the cleanliness of other related websites. This is another common type of hacking related to not updated site. I used to have a ecommerce website on Zencart with over 100 pages. After it got hacked, my main page and several other services related pages showing “Your site got hacked by…” They even give email Gmail email address there. I wonder Google still keep this email active. There are network of hackers who competes among each other to hack any vulnerable programs. Usually, they use hacking to make quick money by grabbing credit card or banking details.
In relation to the above, the malicious code alert would also appear if the owner’s website contains links from or to other sites that have bad ware. To resolve this it is important that the owner regularly checks on their out links to ensure that they are not connected to malicious sites. The other reason is when a site or page facilitates the loading of flash or other files that are designed to carry out malicious processes or things that are out of date. I find this tool to be extremely helpful in finding any bad links on our site. We may accidentally link to bad site. It is not practical to screen through hundreds or thousands of pages for bad outgoing links. Keeping our site clean with healthy outgoing links can help too. Other than that, installing good malware or antivirus software on our server to protect our files can help too. So, choosing a reliable hosting service provider also plays some role here.
Written by Atniz
Topics: Tools