A hacker might not cause any noticeable damage when infiltrating your web server. You may not notice any change in performance or any loss of data. But that doesn't mean everything is okay. A popular use of a compromised server is to distribute malware. Malware is mal icious soft ware . It gets embedded into your website's pages and can infect any visitors to those sites. Hackers do this by injecting malicious code into a database or into web page templates. Visitors get redirected to malicious sites, or inadvertently download trojans. If an online antivirus tool detects a site hosting malware, it will blacklist the site by adding it to its database of malicious websites. Users of the same a...

Good news is always worth repeating: Plesk integrates ImunifyAV into its famous WebOps hosting control panel. It's not even been a year yet but we're already seeing the benefits of integrating Revisium's advanced antivirus and anti-malware scanner into ImunifyAV . One of these good signs is the decision by Plesk to integrate our free scanner directly into their core product. I know Plesk's customers are going to love how ImunifyAV makes their web sites safer. It's quick, it's easy, and best of all, it's free. Keeping web servers safe shouldn't be a headache or an afterthought. ImunifyAV is the cure for both problems. ImunifyAV automatically scans your websites for malicious files. If it find...

The good news just keeps coming: cPanel & WHM integrates ImunifyAV into its hosting automation platform.

cPanel is integrating ImunifyAV, our advanced antivirus and anti-malware scanner, into its famous web hosting control panel.

ImunifyAV automatically scans your web site for malicious files and it does it for free. It can detect all kinds of malicious files, such as backdoors, web-shells, viruses, hacker’s tools, black hat SEO scripts, phishing pages, and others. If any are found, ImunifyAV will report back telling you how to remove them manually.

I appreciate that not everyone has the time or knowledge to do this, so there’s a built-in upgrade option to ImunifyAV+ which lets you perform an automated one-click clean up. It’s quick, it’s thorough, and it removes the stress and worry usually associated with managing your cybersecurity defenses.

For those web hosters that need a comprehensive, all-in-one security solution, there’s a further upgrade option available in the form of Imunify360. More and more web hosters and Linux server managers around the globe are choosing Imunify360 for its ability to protect web servers and websites effectively and simply. Its multi-layered security architecture incorporates a firewall, WAF, IDS and IPS, and advanced machine learning for dynamic rule and signature creation. There’s also our unique herd immunity, the name we give to how Imunify360 instances share threat intelligence information among one another, forming a web of cyber threat knowledge greater than the sum of its parts. All in all, it makes Imunify360 the complete, perfectly integrated web security package.

A month in development passes so quickly.

We announced in February that we have a new version of Imunify360 coming with some great new features. It’s ready, it’s out of beta and into general availability. Here’s a quick reminder of the new stuff. More details are in the Imunify360 4.0 preview post.

Feature Management (cPanel only for now)—Our cPanel users will see a new and better way to manage the features they offer their users. Feature Management is the new way to manage features, fully integrated into cPanel. It’ll give a lot of flexibility in adjusting the features available on hosting service plans and packages.

Dashboard/Charts—Now you’ll be able to see how well Imunify360 has been defending your systems, where attacks are coming from and how many. There are these new alerts, with more coming soon: total number of alerts, number of CAPTCHA events, number of WAF alerts, number of web-based brute-force attacks, number of OSSEC (network level) attacks, number of denied requests from bad bots.

Proactive Defense extension: The Blamer—The Blamer is a new extension to Proactive Defense. It gathers intelligence on attack profiles and uses this information to prevent future attacks.

I have good news—there are features coming in Imunify360 4.0 that will make your life easier, your servers safer, and your businesses more profitable.   1. Feature Management ​ Our cPanel users will see a new and better way to manage the features they offer their users. Feature Management is our new way to (can you guess?) … manage features. It's fully integrated into cPanel and it's going to make dealing with multiple service plans and packages a breeze. Before, you could only change features user by user. Now, you can assign any feature changes to entire service plans. (You might even get a welcome windfall from this extra flexibility.) For the time being, the features you'll be able ...

Thank you, beta testers! We value your dedication to making our product better. Your real-world input helps Imunify360 become the most effective and efficient Linux server security product out there. So here's the deal—we need you to activate Proactive Defense. Proactive Defense is one of the core pillars of Imunify360, able to trace PHP opcodes at runtime, detect and block malicious invocations before it can even execute. We've made some improvements to Proactive Defense: We've refactored the detection algorithm. It's now much faster at tracing PHP code. Proactive Defense examines 50% more URLs and files when scanning, improving detection rates. Proactive Defense works just as it should wit...

General ​ WebShield is a component of the Imunify360 security solution. Its primary purpose is to handle HTTP traffic and prevent HTTP attacks. As a security solution, WebShield is meant to: Block blacklisted traffic Redirect graylisted traffic to CAPTCHA until the CAPTCHA is passed Act as a proxy service, redirecting remaining traffic to backends It consists of four services: WebShield itself Shared memory daemon SSL-caching daemon Sentrylogs daemon Shared memory is the component of WebShield that makes it easier to deal with certain aspects of Nginx configuration without reloading. It does this by modifying its shared memory. SSL-caching daemon watches changes to host SSL certificate sets ...

​For ISPmanager panel users, Revisium Antivirus changes its name to ImunifyAV , keeping its reputation as a popular and effective malware and virus scanner. Today, ISPsystem release a new version of their ISPmanager Lite hosting panel. This version comes pre-installed with ImunifyAV , the new name for Revisium Antivirus. With it, you can scan an unlimited number of websites and users per server, do automatic malware cleanup and create schedules for scanning. You can also get email alerts about any website infections. You can find ImunifyAV in the Tools menu: ​ If a user doesn't have an antivirus solution already configured, ImunifyAV becomes the default for that panel. Otherwise, a system ad...

If you think your site won't be hacked because it's too small to matter, think again. I'll show why that is a false and dangerous assumption. Many site owners and webmasters think that hackers only care about popular, highly-ranked websites. They are wrong. High traffic volume helps boost earnings on partner programs by redirecting visitors to other sites, gets more views of unauthorized advertisements and attracts more clicks on rogue links. But that is not the only way hackers make money. Unprotected sites with low traffic volume are equally attractive to hackers. It is the way they are used that differs from how hackers monetize more popular websites. Any normal site, with an audience of ...

If you use Plesk, you'll know it's one of the leading control panels for web hosters and resellers, and one that supports Opsani VCTR, or, to give its new name, Imunify QuickPatch . Here's an introduction to what it does and why you need it if you care about the security of hosted websites. Making sure your system and its packages are up to date is a fundamental strategy for keeping systems secure. The problem is in the management overhead this creates. The packages and configurations of each system must be regularly checked and updated*. Imunify QuickPatch does this for you. Imunify QuickPatch is free. It scans and analyzes your system for security issues. Imunify QuickPatch analyzes server...

Plesk panel users will soon notice a change in their panels. For Plesk panel users, Revisium Antivirus changes its name to ImunifyAV , keeping its reputation as a popular and effective malware and virus scanner, and joining the Imunify360 security solution for complete protection of Linux Web servers. As with its previous version, ImunifyAV comes in free and paid versions. The free ImunifyAV efficiently scans websites and detects all kinds of malware. Use it for an unlimited number of scans on all websites on a server. ImunifyAV+ is the paid upgrade that does this and more, with a one-click automated cleanup option for full sanitization of entire servers, effortlessly. Both versions have an ...

Keeping watchful is the first step towards effective security; keeping malicious code out of your websites is essential to protect them. I'm excited to let you know about ImunifyAV, our powerful new malware scanner. It's currently available in beta for cPanel and DirectAdmin panels. I'm also happy to tell you it's free and will always be free (as in forever). Here's more about it. ​ ImunifyAV detects all kinds of malware in all types of files —it doesn't matter whether your websites are based on PHP (like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal), or built with classic, static HTML. Our advanced de-obfuscation techniques let it detect malicious code hidden in files using encryption or encoding. ImunifyA...

Twenty years on and spam is still a problem. I'll look at why that is and what we can do to reduce or prevent it. Contrary to popular belief, hacking a site and uploading malicious scripts onto it is not the only way spamming gets a foothold. There are other ways. For example, it could be because of a compromised account, the use of script vulnerabilities, or an incorrectly configured mail server. The diagram below shows an overview of the methods. ​ In this article, I'll look at the different ways unsolicited email (spam) can emanate from a web server, and some of the ways you can stop it. Spamming by hacking A hacked site or server is the most common reason behind an outbreak of spamming a...

There's only one good reason why the load on your hosting server starts increasing–the rest are bad. I'll look at how and why they all happen. I was often contacted by site owners who had a problem with high server load. This common condition is first noticed when an owner gets a warning message from their hosting company. Such messages can be precursors to the blocking of the site, and it can happen to almost any site owner or webmaster. This article covers the different reasons why the load on a site or server might be increasing, and what can be done about it. Webmasters usually find out about excess load from their hosters. Hosting companies regulate and control resource usage for each h...

In this article, I look at why webmasters, site administrators and their users choose and use weak passwords. Later, I recommend ways to create passwords that are reliable and resistant to brute-force attacks. Warnings that the internet is increasingly an unsafe environment appear with alarming regularity in studies commissioned by companies specializing in information security. The growing number of web attacks and the increasing activity of the hacker community require a new discipline and focus on security. But while cybersecurity experts are talking about high technology and advanced protection, it seems a rudimentary rule has been forgotten: the use of strong passwords. Unreliable passw...

In Part 1 , we looked at security isolation as a technical solution for preventing infections on one site spreading to neighboring sites in multi-site hosting systems. In Part 2, we'll consider other non-technical ways to beef up multi-site protection. Site security = technical protection + organizational measures If you don't use security isolation on sites in the same hosting account, you should at least give each site its own account. However, this is often impossible, as the combined sum of each site's content resource needs (disk, memory) is too great. This is where the next elements of complex security come in. I call them organizational measures . Here are some examples. ​ Secure work...

Running shared or VPS servers has risks. When one site is hacked, neighbors succumb shortly after. In this two-part article, I'll explain the risks in detail and what you can do to mitigate them. Shared hosting and VPS servers allow you to host several sites within one user account. If you're a webmaster, a web studio, an Internet agency, or a business owner, you do this not only for convenience but also to save money, as it is cheaper than buying separate accounts for each site. But there's a problem. Multi-site accounts are vulnerable to hacking and the subsequent infection of the entire hosting account. Often, there are dozens of "patients" (tenants) on the same site who urgently need tre...