Spam is a pain point for many website owners all over the world. While spam itself stands for annoying unsolicited messages repeatedly sent on the web, spam manifests itself in many forms including malware, viruses, junk content, web scam and more.
If left unchecked, it can ruin your online presence, reputation, search engine rankings, and the number of visitors you receive and in turn your business. An in-depth website scan using our security tools will find any changes that affect your website.
By not monitoring your website, you can experience dire consequences like:
- Your site may not function correctly, and you will lose leads, contacts and sales.
- Certain kinds of malware may download on to your customer’s computers. Infecting your customers’ computers is not good for your business reputation.
- Having a website with spam and malware all over it will make you lose credibility in the eyes of your customers.
- Your website may get blacklisted by major search engines, Google, Yahoo, and Bing, and social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.
- Your email address may also get affected by the spam and malware on your site if it shares the same domain. If this happens, your customers may not receive any emails from you.
Types of web spam techniques
Hackers are becoming ever more intelligent in different ways to infect websites and keep them from running correctly. Some of these techniques also affect your customers when they visit your website.
A backdoor is created by spammers as a secret way to bypass normal website authentication or encryption. Spammers use backdoors to gain remote access to your website. Usually, backdoors are hidden within website code or web applications and are typically designed to steal passwords and personal data from your website.
Website defacement is usually the result of an attack on a website. Like the name suggests, it results in the defacement of the website in that it changes how the website or web page appears visually.
Website defacers are spammers who hack into your web server and replace your website with one of their own. It is a form of online vandalism or digital graffiti usually resorted to by protestors or even hackers who want to show off their ability to hack into your website.
Phishing stands for an attempt to get personal information like user name, password, credit card details, etc., by posing as a trustworthy and legitimate entity through spam email communications.
A phishing website also called a 'spoofed' website is usually a fake website impersonating a legitimate site encouraging visitors to part with personal information. Spoofed sites appear generally when someone mistypes the address while trying to visit a legitimate site.
When your website faces a phishing attack, it becomes vulnerable to the attacker, who can try and steal sensitive information either from your site, database or from visitors to your website.
Malware is software created to damage or disable computers. Malware injection is a type of attack where a hacker or spammer gets access to your web server and adds malicious code within your web pages to harm the computers of those who visit your site. Another form of malware injection can be when malicious code is injected into a company's intranet to infect the computers of everyone working within the company's network. Whether it harms your employees or potential customers, malware injection eventually hurts your business. It can also result in your website getting listed in search engines' spam blacklist. Once your site is infected, you need a malware removal service to clean it completely.
Every web application relies on configuration settings to function correctly. If your website uses a web application of any type to function, it becomes vulnerable to a misconfiguration attack. When it happens, your web application does not function as intended. Because it has been misconfigured, it can either malfunction or cause severe damage. In either case, it poses a security risk to your business and customers.
Web developers commonly use plugins and extensions. They speed up the development process, provide standardized experiences and eliminate the need to reinvent the wheel. Just like your website can be subject to a spam attack, hacking or other forms of security risks, so can the plugins and extensions on your site. If a plugin or extension faces a security breach, it impacts all the websites using that extension or plugin, and every person who visits the affected websites.
Junk code or content injection is usually not meant to harm your website, server or the computers of your visitors. Often harmless, it feeds a hacker's vanity when they are able to add junk code or content within your web pages. While it might be intended to be harmless, junk can bloat up the code of your site making it less search engine friendly. This can impact how many visitors it can attract. Meaningless content can provide a poor experience to your visitors and harm your company's image.
As the hacking menace has increased, so have security measures. Server level security, encryption, firewalls, etc., have made it harder to hack into servers. Breaking an encryption and gaining access to a server can now require millions of trial-and-error attempts. Hackers, in turn, have developed software that makes these millions of attempts automatically in a short period of time. When it happens, your site is attacked by 'brute force.' It can overload your site, slow it down or even make it go down when the servers are overloaded.
Our process
Our team of experts can:
- Review your website to see if it infected with spam, viruses, malware or any other form of security risk/attack.
- Perform website maintenance and remove unwanted code that caused the spam.
- Advise on options of how to update the code to stop it happening in the future.
- Use Google Webmaster Tools to remove your website from Google’s spam list.
- Use the Facebook Website Debugger to identify spam and malware issues with your website and unblock it.
Our team will monitor your website to ensure it has not been affected. If we come across any of the techniques mentioned or anything new, we will clean and remove any malware or code from your website.
Malware removal
Removing malware and other forms of code injection can be difficult. Our services include junk removal service, virus removal, blacklist removal, periodic anti-malware scans, and continuous tech support. We are committed to removing and cleaning all malware and backdoors that have been installed on your website. Hackers tend to attack websites where they find bugs in the code. These bugs make it easy for hackers to get in and change features on your website.
Backup services
To ensure there is no lost data, we will back up your entire website. If left undetected, spam and malware can significantly damage your website and infect your customer’s computers. Our team will monitor your website and inform you of any spam or malware which needs attention.
CMS protection
For any websites using an open source CMS, our team will ensure all extensions and scripts have been installed. Open source CMS includes Joomla, WordPress, and Drupal, among a list of other open source CMS platforms.
SSL certificates
Our team will install an SSL Certificate on your website. Customers feel safe browsing through your website when it shows an SSL security certificate. Google determines how websites are ranked by whether they have an HTTPS secure website or not.
If you think you are affected by spam or want to avoid spam by conducting regular checks on your site, contact Flying Cow Design.
Contact Flying Cow Design and protect your site from spam and malware today!
