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 ...

Introduction Very often, web hosting administrators start to take security measures only after a website has been hacked. So, let us imagine the situation when ImunifyAV has been installed on such an infected server. All malware has been cleaned in one click, and all malicious activity has been stopped. Are we good to go? Are there any safety steps required? Actually, the answer is, "Yes, there are still some steps that can be taken after cleanup". Make sure you use all the product's benefits  Imunify360 consists of multiple modules, including a WAF, malware detection, Proactive Defense, IDS / IPS, and others. I recommend you check out the documentation for each part of the product to g...

By Andrey Kucherov, Malware Analyst at Imunify360 The detection rates of anti-malware and antivirus scanners varies considerably. Knowing how to manually scan for and remove malware is an important and useful skill with which to confirm a scanner's effectiveness or compensate for its failings. In this article, Andrey Kucherov, Malware Analyst at Imunify360, describes some essential manual website malware detection and cleanup techniques.   Introduction The reality of modern security creates new challenges for web hosts every day. It is well known that there is no absolute protection that guarantees a 0% chance of your website being hacked. Even major players in online markets suffer fro...

If you're using a well-known website antivirus and anti-malware solution, you wouldn't expect to be hacked on average 12 or so times per month, would you? Well, yes, you would, but only if that well-known name isn't Imunify360 . This was the case at Yourname.nl , a Dutch hosting provider offering cost-efficient WordPress and Joomla hosting for SMBs and individuals. Their customers' sites were being compromised around 3 times a week, even though they'd tried vanilla ModSecurity and a widely marketed website security solution provider. When they installed Imunify360, their cybersecurity incidences went down by over 90%. While it is easy to calculate the reduction in infiltration attempts, it i...

Stay in the light; be aware of the dark. Anonymous 'Know your enemy' is an overused cliche in the cybersecurity industry. We take a broader view: Know your world, and your place in it.  Our team knows the hacking world. We've recruited ethical hackers, OSCP-certified engineers, and seasoned IT professionals, all of whom are watching the dark web and its subversive operatives, watching how threats evolve and how attacks are planned. We routinely monitor zero-day exploits, examining use-cases thoroughly and responding with robust mitigation strategies. The fruits of intensive research and development are augmented by both human experience and machine learning. This sharpens our ability to...

By Andrey Kucherov, Malware Analyst at Imunify360.  This article discusses the hidden pitfalls of hosting multiple websites on one hosting account, and how you can remediate the consequences of website cross-contamination. The structure of virtual hosting (also known as shared hosting) can be illustrated by a bee hive: each website (bee) has its own folder (cell). At the same time, all bees share the same hive (hosting account resources, such as disk space, database, RAM, CPU, etc.). In most cases, hosting companies do not provide resource isolation for shared hosting accounts (plans that let you host multiple websites on one account). In practice, that means that all website files are ...

​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 ...

Thousands of websites get hacked on a daily basis. Actually, thousands out of the many billions of websites on the Internet is quite a low percentage, but if you got unlucky and your website is among those, you need to take it seriously, and respond to the threat quickly and wisely. Unfortunately, very often, website owners are 100% sure that they won't ever be a victim, and do not have a valid disaster recovery plan for such cases. Or, if they do, the plan consists of just one bullet point: I was unlucky and the plan is to shut down my business. In this article, I cover that gap and offer you a solid disaster recovery plan if your website got hacked. Once Upon a Time, a Website Got Hacked… ...

The popular Van Ons WordPress plugin for GDPR compliance, with more than 100,000 active installations, was patched on November 7th due to a privilege escalation vulnerability ( CVE–2018–19207 ) found in version 1.4.2. The WP GDPR Compliance plugin helps website owners meet the recent GDPR European data privacy regulation. This came into effect in May of this year, boosting the plugin's popularity. Starting on 10th November, our Threat Intelligence Group noticed a surge in attacks targeting this exploit vector.   Imunify360 customers were already protected by a WAF rule issued several days earlier. This rule detects and blocks malicious payloads attempting to exploit this attack vector. ...

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...

The latest wave of Drupalgeddon activity highlights the importance of keeping software up to date, especially when it's a popular CMS like Drupal , itself based on the rapidly changing web development programming language PHP and the widely used open source RDBMS MySQL. Our Analyst's Insight into this vulnerability gives more details. Imunify360 defends against this threat by virtue of a sophisticated WAF rule set developed and maintained by our own threat intelligence team. Larger vendors' rulesets are too general and too inflexible to track such dynamic threats. Another component in Imunify360's layered security defenses is called Proactive Defense. It uses comprehensive heuristics to dete...

Activity Our monitoring systems identified a first-wave malicious campaign on April 12th, 2018, the same day that proof of concept code went public. The Drupal core security team had earlier released security advisory SA-CORE–2018–002 on the 28th March. We released our blocking and detection rules a few days later meaning that Imunify360 customers were already protected by the time the campaign started. October saw a new burst of attacks on this vector. Botnets located on thousands of IPs requested access to Drupal-based sites to upload a malicious payload. The chart below shows the activity levels for the past few months. Recognition Most connections were attempting to extract the server's ...