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.

Ning is the leading online platform for the world’s organizers, activists and influencers to create their own social network

One of our customers had created a social project on Ning.com, which allows its members to interact with one another and share pictures and songs. Things were going well, until she discovered that their yearly subscription fee for a premium package containing the features that she currently uses, now costs USD400 a year! Describing this as ‘horrible,’ she came to us seeking for a more feasible alternative.

We reviewed her current website and looked up similar cases. Some have suggested that users migrate from Ning.com to WordPress MU. But, we’ve tried WordPress MU in the past, and found the multi blog to be far too complicated.

Then, we explored the possibility of migrating from Ning.com to WordPress, but we found that WordPress may not be such a good idea either since the two platforms are so different.

Finally, we discovered that a Facebook Page would be the best alternative. We did the checks, informed our customer of our findings and the customer checked back with us to find out if an FB Page could support Video and MP3 sharing. We told her that all this can be done with Youtube’s embedded code and a Facebook application called MP3

Her response? “Thanks again for all your help! I really am very happy with the service I’ve received from 1.com.my”

You’re most welcome!

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

We tried to suggest several alternate domain named, but they were simply not what he wanted. Finally, one day, the domain name was released, so we quickly snapped it up and registered it. We then set up a Blog with this domain name.

The Blog, Our Different View (ODV) is another way for MACC to educate and enlighten the public about the truth regarding MACC from our own perspective.

Happy ending at last.

Ruby on rail web hosting by 1.com.my

Last night, our team managed to complete yet another web hosting setup within 2 hours. All this done at breakneck speed although it is after office hours and the next day is Labour Day.

Since the new domain name is .com, it can be registered and approved immediately and activated within a couple of hours. Then, we proceeded with the web hosting setup. The customer had chosen us because of the Ruby on Rail support on our Cloud platform.

This morning, we found this short but sweet message from the customer: “Cepatnya. Thank you very much Pin and the gang.” You’re most welcome!

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

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?

In a perfect world, your web hosting company might assume that every website consumes the same processing power, but this is not the case. Busy websites with heavy codes can take up more compute cycles. Compute Cycle (CC) provides a better way to measure how busy a website is, apart from its bandwidth and storage. It’s fair to say that those with higher CC’s should be charged more.

“Compute Cycles are a measurement of the processing time that your applications require, attained by calculating CPU processing time and accounting for the disk I/O consumed by your application’s operations”

Our standard web hosting comes with 10,000 CC a month, more than enough for most websites. So far, we’ve only had two customers who’ve exceeded their CCs. Instead of charging them (or penalising them), we work hand in hand with them to look into their site and find out if we can reduce the high CC problem. Since both of them are running busy Blogs, we introduced the WP-Cache, a plugin that serves content from the cache for faster access and reduced CC.

“XXX hosting company in Malaysia offers an unlimited hosting plan that comes with unlimited storage that allows you to host unlimited web sites”

The word ‘unlimited’ is catchy but doesn’t ring true. Many web hosting plans boast about supporting unlimited or certain number of add-on domains. In a nutshell, you can host a number of websites by subscribing only to one hosting package. Such a setup is messy and often turn the server unmanageable or abused.

We limit our hosting package to host only one website for each hosting package subscribed. For example, if our customer wish to setup a new sub-domain (eg, blog.xxx.com), they need to subscribe to a new web hosting package.

One of our friends who had subscribed to our web hosting service to host their Cradle award winning CRM project has subscribed to the additional hosting xxx.coconect.com. Each hosting is RM80 a year, though it doesn’t come with ‘unlimited add-on domain’ we are sure that is a better approach!

“We’d like to continue supporting you as we really like your service,” said one of the founder of Coconect.

“Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 491520 bytes)”

Always ready to lend our customers a helping hand, we informed him that he could try to increase the allowed memory size limit via:

1. htaccess e.g. (php_value memory_limit 64M).
2. wp-config.php e.g. (define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64MB’);)

Technical jargon aside, there’s a happy ending, and here’s what the customer told us

A kid was looking at the Great Orion Nebula

“Thanks for the quick reply. I have tried the first method and it works like a champ! You’re superb. It also solves the problems that have bugged me for so long. There were some “sub dashboard” at the dashboard that wouldn’t load properly. After I increased the memory limit to 64M, everything just works now. Previously I thought it could be due to the confliction among the plugins. Thank you very much,” said Robin of Astronomy Notes.

You’re very welcome!