Friday Roundup: Will malware affect me?

Welcome to the Friday roundup. Today is Friday, November 11th, 2016. Today's topic is will malware affect me? Hello, everyone. I'm John Peterson with Develare. Will Malware affect me? This is something that comes up time to time with us. We've got a lot of small business owners that we work with. They're thinking, "My small business website, it's not the Houston Chronicle. We're not event he Houston Texans for that matter. Why would they come and attack my website?"

The thing is malware attacks your website for many different reasons. Some of those reasons include making you an unwitting salesman for pharmaceuticals. In fact, you might have nothing to do with pharmaceuticals. Your business may sell nothing or that sort, but all of a sudden Viagra, Cialis, and others start appearing on your site. That's a big reason why malware attacks many websites, especially in the small business sector.

Now, the other reason is to harvest credit card numbers. Malware can add some code to your site and then start sniffing for those credit card numbers. This is less of an issue now with HTTPS, SSL, et cetera. However, it's still a concern. If you've got eCommerce on your website, you got to make sure that malware stays off. Otherwise, you could be in big trouble if those credit card numbers get out and they found out that your website was the cause of those credit card numbers getting stolen.

Now, the other big reason is also just recruiting, recruitment into these worldwide zombie bot nets to attack other people. What is this worldwide zombie bot net? Well, if you saw the news back in October, Twitter was taken down several times in late October. It was taken down by a bot net composed of internet enabled DVRs, internet enabled security cameras, who knows, maybe even internet enabled refrigerators. The thing is if a refrigerator can be recruited to take down Twitter, your website can too.

What do you do? Well, first of all, if you have a WordPress website, make sure you keep up with updating WordPress. WOrdPress makes it super easy for you to update the site, WordPress itself, the plug ins, the themes. The issue there when you're updating your website is sometimes there's incompatibilities. I speak to a lot of small business owners that are really hesitant to update those plug ins, but you've got to update those plug ins. You've got to update WOrdPress. You've got to update those themes. The thing is you've got to test to make sure it doesn't break.

If you guys need help in that area, we're happy to help out. We're experts in that area. Updates are super important. The other thing is no matter how good your security protocol is, no matter how good you update, sooner or later you might just become victim to malware. In that case you want to make sure that you have a good security scanning service on your site. Now, if you're on a hosted solution. like WP Engine or Site Ground, et cetera, they do offer malware scanning as a feature with their hosting solutions.

However, for us what we like is Sucuri. Sucuri is an awesome malware security monitoring service. THey'll check your site from front end to back, make sure you don't have any malware on there. The more important thing is they're really quick about getting back to you if they do detect malware. You want to make sure if there is malware, if it makes it onto your site for circumstances or reasons that are really beyond your control, you want to make sure you have a security scanning service, like Sucuri, to check every day, check every few hours, alert you, and let you know so you can get that malware taken off.

Make sure your website isn't used to recruit you as a salesman for pharmaceuticals, make sure your website's not being used to take down sites like Twitter or other folks, and really just keep you in good graces online, and make sure your customers have an awesome experience on your website. This has been the Friday roundup. I'm John Peterson with Develare. Thank you for tuning in. Signing off.