Over the past year we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of sites that have been hacked, the types of hacks vary from simply defacing the site to stealing databases containing confidential customer information, to more sophisticated hacks where payment systems are replaced and customers making purchases on the compromised store have all their details sent to the hacker rather the store owner.

Many of our customers are now PCI compliant which goes some way towards preventing a site from being hacked by externally scanning for vulnerabilities on the site or server. However a PCI scan does not prevent hackers from uploading backdoor scripts to your site neither does it detect them once they are installed. This sort of exploit can (and does) go unnoticed for months and the longer the hacker has access to your site the more damage is done. If the hacker is stealing customer credit card information from your site this can result in substantial fines from the card issuers.

Whilst we already offer a high level of protection for your site and server there are situations where hackers get around this protection, for example we recently had a customer's site compromised by hackers who stole FTP login details from his PC which itself had been compromised with a virus.

For these reasons we have begun offering a new Exploit scanning service. This service will scan all of your files on your hosting account looking for compromised files or viruses and alerting you when anything suspicious is found. In addition the Exploit scanner will actively scan all files uploaded via FTP or through a web page which is a common way for hackers to get in initially.

Once the scan is complete it will report any of the following problems that it finds:

Scripts which appear fine but have been compromised
Script contents which match a comprehensive fingerprint database
Hidden directories
World writable directories
Suspicious filenames
Viruses

We ran a test scan on one of our servers and got the following results:

Scanned directories: 770
Scanned files: 11744
Ignored items: 7
Suspicious items: 88
Viruses found: 18
Fingerprint matches: 66
Data scanned: 933.12 MB
Scan time/item: 0.016 sec
Time: 201.006 sec

What's interesting about these findings is these customers were completely unaware of any problems and one has been infected since February!

Ideally we would like to offer this service to all of our customers free of charge but unfortunately this isn't possible. The scanning software costs money to purchase, install and maintain. In addition as with the all the services we offer we wil give you as much help as possible if (or when) a compromise happens.

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