Malware warning sign by Google

Well, one of the most common symptoms that tells you the website is under attack is like one below or it might just return you a blank white page. So there is a few things you get do to get it back running normally.

Common malware infected symptoms

1. Do a fresh WordPress upgrade. Don’t just overwritiing
2. Remove malicious codes (themes, plugins, .htaccess)
3. Remove cache and sitemaps
4. Check database for malicious codes (use phpmyadmin > Search)
5. Change database and FTP password
6. Housekeeping WordPress users and change password
7. Upgrade all plugins to latest version
8. Submit malware review via Google Webmaster Tools

Other symptoms of website under attacked by Malware:

1. Returning a blank page
2. Alignment of the content in your page is off
3. Certain dynamic-page of your website does not work
4. Some of your plug-ins used in WordPress does not work
5. Files shown on FTP client ends with an extension of “.INFECTED”
6. A malware warning sign on the web browser
7. Unknown .htaccess file in directories

Malware removal tips

To manually deactivate all Plugins without WP admin access, you can do it by clearing the values in wp_options > active_plugins

Your site is not reviewed by Google immediately. The warning sign may remain for few hours despite all malware are already removed.

The warning sign states the name of the malware. Use it as the keyword in your search for malicious code.

Posted by Adrian

Other related articles:
Recovering from site compromise
Malware injection attack

Notes: For those who need the help to investigate your website, please use the Contact us form to inform us.

We conducted a post study based on the records and suspected that the email was not sent out by a third party sender, and therefore, our customer did not receive it. After further investigation, we notice that this may not be the case. Then, we turned to our server log file. We process hundreds of millions of emails daily, so it’s not easy to retrieve a log file.

We were finally able to trace the email and confirm that had been delivered to our customer. But then, where has the email gone? Other service providers may just stop here and blame the user for losing the email in the first place. Case closed, but not us. We traced the email once again and finally found that the customer had enabled a setting to remove any email detected as Spam.

So, basically, we discovered that the email from the sender arrived in our customer’s Spam box and that it had been removed and therefore not found by the user. Email retrieved. Case solved. A happy ending.

The 'Delete message from folder' setting in the email control panel

The installation of Joomla and Opencart usually takes hours to complete. You’ll be required to upload thousands of files to the server before you can even start the installation. To save time, you can upload a single tar file and untar it using the build in Cron management on the Web Hosting Control Panel.

Here’s how to use cron to untar files

1) Save the following lines as a new file and upload to the cgi-bin folder. Update the path accordingly. Change the file permission to 755.

#!/usr/bin/perl
$result=`/bin/tar -xf /path/to/tar/file/file.tar.gz 2>&1`;
print "tar extraction error: $result" if $?;

2) Upload your tar file to the server.

3) Create a cron job (select “perl” and 5 minutes as the min)

4) The extracting process will start after five minutes. Once the task has been completed, remove the cron job to prevent re-extracting every five minutes, and you’re done!

Using cron to untar files

Sample cron entry

“The BlackBerry Internet Service, or BIS, allows BlackBerry users to access the Internet and POP3/IMAP/Outlook Web Access email accounts without connecting through a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). The service is usually provisioned through your mobile phone service provider, though Research In Motion (RIM) (BlackBerry’s developer) actually runs the service. This service uses RIM’s proprietary push technology (in contrast with SyncML-based push technologies such as Funambol) to the BlackBerry devices over cellular carriers; BIS retrieves email from mail servers via POP3 or IMAP is done via polling.”

Using BIS, you can integrate your phone with no more than 10 POP or IMAP accounts. To begin, please choose your Telco from Blackberry’s main website. For more setup guidelines, check this out.

When you’re asked, “What is your Mail Server?” enter imap.emailsrvr.com, running on port 143. Your outgoing mail server is smtp.emailsrvr.com, running on port 587. The username is your full email address.

For those Blackberry owners without a BIS plan, you can download a third party email client called Tiggitmail. This software is not free.

If you wish to learn more about the BIS plan, check this out:

Maxis Blackberry Internet Service

Maxis Blackberry Internet Service

Celcom Blackberry Biz Plan

Celcom Blackberry Biz Plan

Related Post:
Blackberry without BIS BES is nothing!

Nokia email

Most Nokia phones allow you to access your mailbox on the go. You’ll find it extremely useful when you need to sneak peek into your Inbox when you’re out of the office without your notebook. In general, setting up the email function in your Nokia phone is pretty straight forward. It usually starts from the Mail Settings options.

For those with POP and IMAP support, choose IMAP.

- Incoming mail server: imap.emailsrvr.com (port 143)
- Outgoing mail server: smtp.emailsrvr.com (port 587)
- Username: your email address
- Your SMTP requires authentication.
- SMTP’s Authentication are the same as your incoming server

For those with only POP support, change imap.emailsrvr.com to pop.emailsrvr.com, and change port from 143 to 110.

Tips:

1. Uncheck ‘Leave a copy of email…’ in your email client. By doing this, your Nokia messenger will only show your new email messages which you have yet to download to your email client.

2. To verify if your password is correct, try it out using the Webmail. If you’ve lost your password, send a password reset request to us via our Contact Us form.

3. Emails sent through your Nokia phone will only appear in the Sent box of the Webmail if you’re using IMAP.

4. International roaming for 3G is possible when you’re abroad. Since Nokia Messenger only downloads the header by default, it requires a minimum bandwidth and you should not expect to pay much.

cPanel's dashboard

The default view of cPanel's FTP

Is this really what a customer would want? If you find cPanel too complicated, like we do, check out the control panel that comes with our web hosting package.

Dashboard with subtle yet comprehensive design

Each site's directories are defined clearly

How to Use Web Hosting Control Panel?

The port 25 is chosen by default

In a nutshell, here are some of the possible scenarios that you might encounter when using port 25:

1. Sending an email from your Outlook Express or Outlook (assuming you’ve configured the email client to use the default port 25 for your SMTP server)

2. Submitting a web form (assuming the back-end was done using a SMTP method)

3. Using Groupmail to deliver email newsletter (assuming the Groupmail is configured to use port 25)

In short, your emails will be blocked and the worst thing is, they’re usually dropped without any returned error messages or notices to the sender. To overcome this issue, we’ve setup an alternate port. You can use port 8025 or port 587 instead of port 25.

TM’s SMTP Nightmare!

So when your business expands, you might consider to get a personalized domain name, like www.yourname.com, and started to worry that current viewers might not be aware of that the owner had moved to a new website. Now, Blogspot plays the important role here. It is able to redirect users accessing the initial blog to the new website address specified of the owner.

Blogspot Setting

Go to your blogspot admin page, Click Settings > Publishing > Custom Domain. Now, user will be prompted 2 choices, if you choose to purchase it from blogspot, no CNAME record needed to be set up; while purchasing it from third party, CNAME need to be set. Both of these redirection are done at no cost unlike other Content Management System.

Just a quick share. The usage of the .my domain name is increasing. Even organizations like MyNIC are using domainregistry.my instead of domainregistry.com.my. Well, basically most companies have now decided to publish .my as the official domain name, instead of .com.my. Obviously, the trend is picking up. We estimate more and more companies will be doing so. If you happen to have a domain name registred under .com.my, we believe that it is good to secure the .my version as well. For example, if you happen to have irishotel.com.my, it is good to register and secure the name irishotel.my.

The registration fee for the .my domain name is only RM120 a year. You can do a name search at http://whois.domainregistry.my/. If it returns ‘..does not exist in database’, the name is available. Then, let us know, we can register the domain name for you, or you can order online.

There’s certainly a risk that someone might take the name from you. In that case, you can file a dispute case to MYNIC’s Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (MYDRP), if you can prove that the person holding the name has bad faith and that it is an infringement ofm your trademark. Bear in mind that the case usually takes up to 6 months to resolve and may cost you more than RM5,000 on the legal fees alone.

Order .my domain name now!

Aiktern, network specialist from Waysoft

In a recent case, one of our customers informed us that they’ve been experiencing duplicate emails and timeout problems. Their connection to our mail server was also extremely slow. We took immediate action to set up a test and confirm that the problem cannot be solved off-site. Though we suspected that the problem was largely due to their network problems, saying “No” to a customer isn’t how we like to do things.

Within a day, we arranged to have Aiktern, a friend and network specialist, attend to our customer in Johor. The on-site investigation was performed and all aspects of the network were checked. A summary of findings was compiled and shared with the customer.

This is how we like to deal with our customer’s email problems, after all, that is our main business!