Preventing Malware – a job for all of us

Malware refers to malicious software or code that targets WordPress sites, themes, plugins and databases. It’s usually created in order to steal data, redirect your site’s visitors, spread spam, and/or gain unauthorized administrative control. Malware often slows sites down and can cause irreversible damage to your SEO.

While Elementor Host takes a number of measures to protect your site, ultimately it’s you, as site administrator, to keep your site and your data safe.  

How malware infiltrates your site

As an open source system, WordPress’ code is available to all, including malicious hackers. This means that website owners, and hosting companies have to take extra steps to block off potential attack routes:

• Malicious plugins: Plugins are small pieces of software that add functionality to your site. Every site depends on plugins but plugins also have the potential to add malicious code to your site
• Outdated plugins and themes: Programmers and hackers are in a constant battle with hackers trying to find security flaws and programmers eliminating those vulnerabilities. 
• Weak passwords: The easiest way for hackers to gain control of your site is to steal your password, making themselves the de facto site admin. Weak passwords are especially vulnerable to brute force attacks and credential stuffing. 

How malware affects your site 

Once malware infiltrates your site, hackers are able to:

• Add hidden redirects, spam content and links to other sites, helping boost these other sites’ SEO. When search engines detect these redirects, they deindex your site, destroying your SEO as search engines will no longer rank your site.
• Steal your site’s resources, slowing down your site which increases your bounce rate and hurts your SEO since your site is now classified as a low-quality site. 
• Steal your visitor information. If your site stores visitor information, hackers now have their data which they can use to send spam and phishing emails. This can cause irreparable damage to your brand by breaking the trust between you and your customers.

How Elementor Host helps protect your site

Keeping your site and your visitors’ information secure is our highest priority. Toward that end, Elementor Host provides the following security measures:

• Cloudflare protection: Elementor Host uses Cloudflare to help prevent:
  • Denial of service attacks where hackers submit a massive number of requests to your site in order to overwhelm it and prevent legitimate visitors from accessing it.
  • Bot attacks where hackers use bots to scrape your information or spy on the backend of your site. 
  • Man-in-the-middle attacks where hackers intercept communications between your site and your visitors. 
  • Cloudflare provides a web application firewall which monitors your website, looking out for common cyberattack patterns such as SQL injections and cross-site scripting.

How you can protect your site 

While Elementor Host can provide you with a measure of security, guarding your site is a joint effort. There are a number of critical steps you must take to protect yourself and your site from malware infection:

• Strong passwords: Passwords that use a mix of capital and lower case letters as well as numbers and symbols can prevent hackers from brute forcing their way into your site. You should also use 2-factor authentication whenever available.
• Update your WordPress version, plugins and themes: Keeping your plugins and themes updated ensures that your site includes the latest security updates. You may want to consider activating automatic updates for your plugins.
• Avoid unvetted plugins and themes: When you install a plugin or theme, your giving the developer access to your site. Before installing a plugin or theme, familiarize yourself with the developer to make sure they’re legit. One good way to do this is to check the number of installs they have. If this software has been installed in a lot of sites, it’s usually a good sign that it’s safe. It’s also a good idea to check the plugins reviews to see if others have had any issues.
• Remove unused plugins and themes: Any software you have installed on your site is another possible entry point for hackers. Keeping unused plugins or themes just provide you with more maintenance and no benefit. They should be deleted as soon as you stop using them. 

By taking these preventative measures, you can work with us to ensure that your site and our community remain safe from hackers.