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

Why machine-generated email sucks?

Ever since we decided that no message should be sent out looking like a machine-generated email, we’ve gotten overwhelming response and found that our customers are more wiling to share their problems with us now.

We are proud that they have us in mind when they come across any questions related to the IT field. Since it’s all about sharing and caring, we’re more than happy to help. In fact, we find it a pleasure to be able to interact with our customers on a personal basis.

Examples of day to day questions that we’ve received include:

Should we respond to emails that claim we have to secure xxxx.cn name etc?

Is safe to press the “proceed” button when the screen says the SSL certificate is not signed properly?

How does one switch to OpenDNS?

What is the best practice in naming a corporate email address?

Thanks for the questions you guys, we hear you and we’re here for you. Keep them coming!

Well, what can I say? It looks like our beloved TM’s Streamyx has been having some issues lately. In most case, the following quick fix will help you out, before you feel to need to get terribly upset with your web hosting provider :)

1. Restart routers, modems, switch or anything tangling with your phone line or Internet connection.

First, restart all devices connecting to your Internet

2. Change to OpenDNS. TM’s DNS is overloaded and down very often. It doesn’t resolve domain names correctly, so if you hit http://www.gutteruncensored.com, you’re pointing to “nowhere.” Yes, chances are you’ll need to change your DNS to 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.

Switching to OpenDNS

A repair of fault of submarine cable linking Malaysia and International network is expecting to cause Internet downtime to Malaysia Internet users, until 2nd May.

Our technical team are ready with alternatives to help our email and web hosting customers. Talk to us if you need our help.

Cable laid beneath the sea to carry telecommunications between countries.

About submarine communications cable
The Internet’s undersea world

The live launch will feature a cleaner interface with a simpler, unified toolbar, easier controls for background images and company logos (in the admin CP) and lots more!

New webmail interface

View larger screenshot

So before you sign up for something, make a point to understand what the package offers, and think about whether or not it suits your needs. We’d have to say that some web hosting companies, especially those who provide customers with CPanel, are nothing but lazy. Not all web hosting customers have extensive technical knowledge, and will therefore find it difficult to tackle technical issues that might crop up. Like, how would a customer know that when an error pops up with PHP, it usually includes a file error?

These problems arise due to the fact that CPanel allows customers to customise features in their hosting account. Too many customisations often lead to confusion and unnecessary packages. Some customers even unknowingly disable their outgoing SMTP server, which makes contact forms and WordPress hosting very unfriendly to users. What happens is, when a user receives comments, they’re not notified accordingly.

Additionally, while some email hosts claim to give you unlimited bandwidth, there are still limitations. After you’ve seen your bandwidth shooting up, you’ll also notice that the loading time for your website has slowed down. So, while their claims of unlimited bandwidth are true, there are hidden bandwidth constraints.

Also, have you ever been enticed by free mailboxes? A friend asked me recently about Google Apps‘ offer of 25 free mailboxes, and if that would affect our business. While his concerns aren’t baseless, he was surprised to learn that we actually suggest the service to our customers and even set it up for them for free. Wait a minute; doesn’t this present a conflict of interest with our own email service (which can cost up to RM99 per mailbox a year)?

Well, as we’re on the frontline, we’re always trying to be different from other service providers. We evaluate new products and services to find the best solutions that’ll work for our customers. We want customers to trust us like we trust Google, in believing that their search engines will give us the most accurate search results. We tested Google Apps, worked and played with it for a couple months, and found that this new application can, in fact, improve our customer’s email communication. But, of course, a single solution can’t solve all problems.

Looking back, we’re glad that we brought Rackspace’s business email solution to Malaysia, although it was one of the most expensive email solutions around. Today, we’re proud to be one of the most reliable email solution companies in Malaysia!

With that in mind, our no-frills web hosting services will only cost RM80 a year. The standard package we have comes with 12GB of bandwidth, 10GB of storage and 1000 compute cycles. Almost 99% of our current website owners use no more than 20% of the usage. For those exceeding their bandwiths, they can rest assured that we don’t badger them into upgrading, which can be costly. We’ll only suggest an upgrade if it is the only solution.

For example we’ve encountered a web owner who accidently uploaded one of Lady Gaga’s songs in MP3, and his bandwidth shot up to few GB a day. Do you think he needed to buy extra bandwidth? By identifiying where goes wrong, we can solve the bandwidth problem without additional upgrade. I don’t think so. Also, we’re the first to limit single-host names per hosting service. Meaning, if you want to have blog.abc.com and abc.com, you’ll need to subscribe to two hosting packages.

Lady Gaga cracks 1 billion views on Youtube

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!

Adrian and David - The Project Managers

Adrian and David, the Project Managers who form the core that drives 1.my’s website maintenance, not only do so at lighting speed, but are so dedicated they’re in cyberspace 24 hours a day.

Adrian works from almost everywhere

As an example of our fast response time, allow us to take one of our most prominent clients, Yinson Holding Berhad as an example. FYI, Yinson provides a comprehensive range of transportation and logistical services, as well as general warehousing facilities. Being a listed company, it is essential for them to update their company announcement system, and a few months back, we installed a Content Management System (CMS) for them to enable announcements by their employees. After making more than 10 announcements, they realised that there wasn’t a link to previous announcements. When they came to us with this issue, we solved the problem within an hour, and now it works perfectly, displaying all the relevant Bursa announcements.

In another success story, one of newest clients, Mr Shamaan, Managing Director of OGP Nova Sdn. Bhd., subscribed to our 99.9% uptime web hosting service. After we set up his corporate website, we quickly created three temporary pages with content from one of his power point presentations. After some time, Mr Shamaan wondered why he was unable to search for his website on search engines, although it was perfectly set up. We explained to him that newly created websites will be not be automatically indexed by search engines. To help in this issue, the web developer would have to set up meta tags for description and keywords, and submit the website URL to search engines. We did all this for him in an hour, and the team’s effort was rewarded with a thumb’s up from Mr Shamaan.

Other than our quick response time, we’re quite proud of the fact that we’re not like other web developers who are content with being passive. We’re proactive. Take our meeting with Maslow Trainers & Consultants, who are based in Kota Kemuning, Shah Alam.
They wanted us to meet up with their senior staff to discuss the development of a Human Resources (HR) Touch System.

Although we didn’t charge them for consultation, we shared a great deal with them at the meeting, including our goals, how the system will be set up, and we even discussed the benefits of online marketing. We believe that defining clear goals before trying out something new is vital to securing future ventures, while maintaining a hold on current businesses. Of course, in return, we learned a great deal from them too on how to manage human resources efficiently and effectively.

Another of our strengths is post-sales support, or after-sales support. For this, allow us to use our client, e-Suria from Petaling Jaya as an example. After we successfully set up the company’s blog using WordPress, we customised the theme to suit their corporate identity, and we also provided them with a tutorial on how to manage their blog with WordPress CMS.

At 1.my, we’re always there for our clients, so if you’re looking for tech support you can depend on, you know who to call.

1) Performance Report

This report details data we’ve collected since May 2009. It indicates the average response time in which our test servers connect to various services every 15 minutes.

Download Report

2) Webmail’s Uptime Report

Our average uptime in 2009 is 99.986%. We experienced two outages, which were recorded in May and June 2009, both lasting no more than 30 minutes.

Download Report

3) Incoming Mail Server’s Uptime Report

Good news! Out POP3 or incoming mail server achieved 100% uptime this year! In fact, we’re proud to say that no downtime was recorded since March 2008. Users should be receiving emails perfectly each time they press the download email button in their Outlook or Outlook Express, but may still encounter problems such as timeouts, which could be caused by ISP or email client problems

Download Report

4) Outgoing Mail Server’s Uptime Report

In 2008, we recorded two outages, but this year, we’ve reduced it to zero. We’re happy to report that the average uptime in 2009 is 100%. Despite the 100% uptime, however, users may still encounter problems with sending out emails. Usually, this is caused by ISPs blocking our SMTP and configuration problems in email clients.

Download Report

5) Mail Server Comparison Report

This comprehensive report reveals the uptime of various email-hosting companies in Malaysia. The monitoring was provided by Hyperspin, an independent 3rd party monitoring service. The monitoring, carried out at 15 minute intervals since December 2007, was performed from multiple monitoring stations worldwide, to eliminate false alarms. All reported downtimes are confirmed by 4 stations. The ‘Monitoring Total Outage’ report refers to the number of downtimes for both incoming and outgoing servers. Total downtime includes the duration of the outage for both incoming and outgoing servers. Just click on individual uptime figures to view detailed Hyperspin reports.

Download Report