Sucuri.net On Top of Malware Infections

It would appear that in late April, May and now June 2010, GoDaddy.com has been (and continues to be) the victim of a sophisticated hack that writes malicious script to many of their shared hosting servers.

How many websites were affected?  Hmm.  Hard to say.  I can say that about 40-percent of the sites I am involved with were affected—I would hate to project such a number across the millions of sites that GoDaddy.com hosts.  They are the biggest player in the shared web hosting game.  Ouch. 

As such, I have spent hours cleaning up websites and some of my more recreational hobby sites are still down (e.g., AcrossRoss.com). Compounding my frustration, several of my sites were re-infected after they were cleaned.  What a nightmare.

There has been one site alone in my opinion that has been on top of the problem from the get go.  That is Sucuri.net (www.sucuri.net).  The folks at Sucuri seemed to have a diagnosis of the GoDaddy malware issue long before GoDaddy.com would even acknowledge they had a problem.  Moreover, for a reasonable fee they will monitor your site for malware and other domain related issues and clean it up if its gets infected. They also provide a free diagnosis scan.  It is money and time well spent.

The best thing about them is you get real and fast personal service. If you need malware removed from your website, you email them.  Case in point: I was simply out of time to spend another half day cleaning up websites.  I registered with their site and notified them via email that 2 of my sites were infected.  They had the malware removed within the hour and I got personal emails about the clean-up.  I was then able to remove the registered logon page and inform the client the site was good to go.

I would highly recommend Sucuri.net to anyone interested in keeping up to date on web security. You should add their Blog to your syndicated news reader. 

Link to the Sucuri Blog: http://blog.sucuri.net/  

Web security is a matter of constant vigilance, monitoring and good planning.  If the web host gets hacked, there is little you can do but enact a backup plan.  You can take every precaution in the world, but if GoDaddy goes down, so do the sites it hosts. As for GoDaddy.com's response - to be addressed in a later post for sure. 

Nonetheless, there are a number of things that can be done routinely to ensure that YOU are not the reason the site gets hacked (by the way, If am your webmaster—you are paying me to do exactly those things).  I'll save those things for another post.  For now, I would like to tip the cap to the folks at Sucuri.net. They did a great job. 

Note: Use our contact form if you would like to look into having web monitoring from Sucuri.net added to your website. There are also Joomla extensions that provide added levels of protection for your website. We can look into any of that stuff.