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Ask anyone who has a website, the worst thing that could happen to his/her website is malware.
What is malware?
Malware is any software intentionally designed to cause disruption to a computer, server, client, or computer network. Once any device is infected with malware the controller will have full control of the infected device. Again there are lots of conditions like privileges that malware is running, permission for the malware so there are lots of conditions on which the effect of malware can be calculated. The worst condition you can imagine is remote code execution with the highest privileges. This could give full control to the hacker.
In this article, I will give you an overview of all tools you can use to identify malware on your WordPress site. There are other tools that will help you in identifying your website is affected by malware or not but this article consists of tools specifically designed for WordPress.
Wordfence
Let’s start with wordfence which I personally use. Wordfence has lots of plans which helps from beginners to enterprise.
Wordfence will give you the details like abandoned plugins, plugins removed from wordpress.org, everyday site scan reports will be sent to the email which contains information like IPs blocked, failed login items, recently modified files, updates needed. When it comes to this plugin, install it and forget about it. The plugin will let you know if there is something wrong.
For the free version, the malware signatures are not detected in real-time but delayed by 30 days so if you want real-time scanning you have to upgrade to the paid version.
Wordfence scans each and every file from the server you are hosting so it will impact the performance so it is suggested to run a scan when the traffic is low. Wordfence is installed in your server and runs scans from your server.
Sucuri SiteCheck
Sucuri SiteCheck is another free malware scanner tool. The advantage of this tool is, you can either run malware scans from the Sucuri website or use their WordPress plugin. This tool also tells whether your site is listed in Google unsafe sites list or black listed by any other sites.
The hurdle for Sucuri is, it uses a crawler to scan the website so it can only scan public pages. Let’s say if you have a private page where users can upload files or download files, these are stored privately and cannot be viewed by the bots so to access these the tool should have authenticated session which is not possible with Sucuri so if you are a general blogger or if you have a specific website which doesn’t have any private pages then Sucuri works for you.
Cerber Security
Cerber Security is one of the best tools for malware scanning and firewall. This tool has hash verification(Integrity check), quick scan(scans only files with executable extensions), full scan, quarantine feature, IP blocking, XMLRPC request monitoring, black listing IPs if the attacker is logging in with default WordPress credentials and the list goes on and on. This tool is like a full security solution for WordPress sites.
Virus Total
Virus total doesn’t have any dedicated plugin for WordPress. It is a web application that scans the given website. Similar to Sucuri this tool scans only the public web pages. This tool can also scan files for malware but you have to upload them manually.
Let me know if you have any questions in the comments below. Please share how do you protect your websites or applications, I will add it here if its helpful.
