The detection rates of anti-malware and antivirus scanners varies considerably. Knowing how to manually scan for and remove malware is an important and useful skill with which to confirm a scanner's effectiveness or compensate for its failings. In this article, Andrey Kucherov, Malware Analyst at Imunify360, describes some essential manual website malware detection and cleanup techniques. Additionally, read our website hosting security article and learn how to keep your website secure in 2021.

Have you ever wondered why malware is so hard to get rid of, and why, no matter how many times you run your malware scanner, infected files keep reappearing, as if by magic?

In this article, I’m going to show the inner workings of such persistent malware, by dissecting and unraveling some malware samples recently discovered by the Imunify360 cybersecurity product.

You’ll see how this particular strain of malware propagates and evades detection, and what you can do to stop it infecting your system.

 

A hacker might not cause any noticeable damage when infiltrating your web server. You may not notice any change in performance or any loss of data.

Recently, we got a few support requests related to the usage of Imunify360 with Cloudflare. We’d like to explain the root cause and provide you with a workaround.

The issue was looking like an inability to pass the Captcha causing an endless loop. Further investigation revealed an issue caused by custom cache settings in the Cloudflare control panel.

This article wants to inform you about the changes in the next Imunify360 and ImunifyAV versions regarding file quarantining in the Malware Scanner. Explore the new features of Linux malware scanner for web servers below.

As part of Imunify360’s proactive malware research activities, we recently identified that a plugin named Malicious Checker from WordPress repository, which can be used to identify malware in web servers, indeed had active malware inside one of the plugin’s source files. Additionally, check our WordPress Security Ultimate Guide for 2021 to learn more about WordPress Security.

At 11 am EST on Friday 14 August, we’ll be conducting a live webinar on the new features and updates of Imunify360. Sign up and join the conversation on what’s new with our automated server protection suite. The webinar recording is available here.

The Imunify security team has identified a security threat: a website, wpnull24.com, that provides WordPress themes infected with malware. This site offers “nulled” themes, or paid-for themes that have been modified so they can be downloaded for free. 

The themes provided free of charge at wpnull24.com are particularly dangerous, because installing one of them infects all of a site’s themes, plugins, and core WordPress files with malware. Once a site is infected, it can be used for black SEO, phishing, and sending spam as well. Access to an infected site can also be sold to other cyber-criminals. 

Over a typical 3-month span, the average server has around 1500 kinds of malware injected into its files. Lately, a great many of these injections have been occurring in WordPress installations. What should you do when malicious code is injected into WordPress files?