Watching Your Site for Malware Intrusions

Website owners need to keep an eye on their website and blog to make sure that they are not unknowingly spewing malware onto the Web. Not only can this be bad for your site visitors, but you can actually get your website blocked by Google for allowing malware downloads; even if you didn’t know that it was happening.

If you have a blog on your site, there are lots of free, cool plugins that monitor your blog and help you to keep it safe, but how about a website? I found one tool recently that allows you to scan your website files for malware. It is called Sucuri. You can visit the free online website scanner here. I recommend not only scanning your root directory, but some of your top traffic directories as well just to make sure you are malware free.

Another tool you can use for malware monitoring of a website is the Google Webmaster Control Panel. To use this Google service you will need to verify your website ownership by downloading and then uploading to your server a small file. Once in place, Google will scan your site and you can review its malware detection results.

In many cases I have found that Google is very slow to report if you have had a malware attack. Eventually they will notify you if there is a problem, but it may be woefully late, and your notification may actually be that Google has banned your site in their index. I personally recommend a much more proactive and early prevention focus.