Experiencing a “This account has been suspended” warning on your website can be both confusing and alarming. This message means that your hosting provider has put your site on a temporary hold. The reasons for an account suspension can range from malware infections and spam content, excessive resource usage, unpaid web hosting bills, or policy violations.
It’s a frustrating situation, especially when the message itself doesn’t tell you why or how to fix it. This problem isn’t insurmountable, though. Even if you’re feeling stuck, there are steps you can take to swiftly get back online.
In this blog post, we’ll explain why a host suspends your site and how you can resolve it. Whether your website was compromised by malware or your hosting payment failed, by the end, you’ll have a clear roadmap for getting your website running again.
Bear in mind, it’s crucial to address this issue promptly, especially when it comes to security breaches like malware. Prompt action can help minimize potential damage and downtime. So let’s dive in and get your website back on its feet.
Contents:
- Understanding “This account has been suspended” errors
- Common reasons for an account suspension
- How to remove account suspensions
- Why does my web host care if I have malware?
- Impact of a hosting account suspension
Understanding “This account has been suspended” errors
Stumbling upon a “This account has been suspended” message on your website can feel like hitting a brick wall. In some cases, you may encounter the following message when you visit your website or /wp-admin/ login page.
You may also be redirected to an entirely new page containing the following URL path: /cgi-sys/suspendedpage.cgi
These warnings essentially mean that your hosting provider has temporarily removed your site from the web. But what are the reasons for an account suspension? Let’s take a look.
Common reasons for an account suspension
There are a number of reasons a web host may suspend your account, including:
- Malware infection: Malware, harmful software designed to cause damage or steal data, can infiltrate your website in a number of different ways, including cross-site contamination, brute force attacks, and vulnerability exploits. If your hosting provider detects malware on your website, they may suspend your account to stop it from spreading or causing further harm to your visitors.
Some examples of website malware include:
- Unwanted redirects to third party websites
- SEO or pharmaceutical spam
- Malicious JavaScript on your website pages
- Server resource overuse: Hosting providers typically set clear boundaries on resource usage, especially those on shared hosting plans. If your website exceeds limitations for server or CPU usage, your host may suspend your account to keep their network running smoothly.
- Payment failures: An unpaid hosting bill will certainly trigger a suspension if you don’t address it in a timely manner. Hosting providers require regular payment to provide their services.
- Terms of service violations: If your website breaches your hosting provider’s Terms of Service or policies — for example, distributing copyrighted or illegal material without permission — they could suspend your account.
It’s important to note that the “This Account Has Been Suspended” notification is intentionally vague to protect your privacy and prevent potential security risks. Depending on your host, you may also receive an email outlining the exact reasons for the account suspension and steps to rectify the situation.
Now that we’ve covered why this error message might occur on your site, let’s dive into what steps to take if your web host has suspended your website.
How to fix “This account has been suspended” due to malware
An account suspension error can be especially tricky to resolve if it’s due to malware. Ultimately, speed is critical in resolving this situation and getting your site back up and running.
There are a few methods you can use to tackle the issue:
- Remove website malware manually
- Remove website malware via a professional service provider
Option 1: Remove website malware manually
There are a number of steps you can take to manually remove malware from your website, but it requires careful execution. Malware cleanup can be a complex task. More than once, we’ve seen well-intentioned website administrators make matters worse in a bid to remove malware.
If you opt for this route, here’s what you need to do.
1. Make a backup of your website and files
This is absolutely essential. Even if your website is infected, a website backup can restore your site if something goes wrong during the manual cleanup or your hosting provider decides to delete your entire site.
Be sure to backup all website files along with your database. WordPress users can check out our guide on how to backup a website with WP-CLI.
Although infected website files (such as .php and .js files) are unlikely to infect your workstation simply by existing on the hard drive, for security reasons it’s still not a good idea to transfer them to your computer. You’ll probably want to create a compressed archive of the site files (such as a .zip or .tar.gz file) on your hosting server first before transferring them elsewhere.
2. Get a list of infected website files
Request a list of suspicious or infected files from your hosting provider. They will usually provide this list in a malware.txt format similar to the one seen below.
This list will serve as a jump-off point for your malware cleanup operation.
3. Locate and clean up the malware infection
Start by examining the files indicated by your hosting provider. Unfortunately, this may not be the full picture. Malware tends to hide in different corners of your website and your providers’ scanner may not detect everything.
Furthermore, items provided on your host’s list may be entirely malicious files or they might be otherwise legitimate files injected with malicious code — you’ll need to take measures to distinguish between them or you may inadvertently break your website.
Your host will likely have disabled any HTTP access to your site, but you should still be able to access your website files and cleanup the infection via FTP or SSH access. We offer a full guide on how to clean up malware from an infected website. If in doubt, you can reach out to a website security professional like Sucuri for assistance finding and cleaning up the infection.
Hosting providers do not typically disable websites for malware that is contained in the database, although there may be content to clean in there as well (such as malicious administrator users that can be used to reinfect the environment). Once the files are clean and your website is reinstated it will be much easier to check further for this.
4. Reach out to your host to submit a review request
Once you have thoroughly reviewed the malware from your site, contact your hosting provider and let them know that you’ve taken steps to rectify the issue. Once it’s back online, you’ll want to thoroughly scan your website at the client and server level to check for any additional signs of infection.
You can use a free remote website scanner like SiteCheck to check your website pages for signs of any further infection. Simply enter your domain name and run a scan to check for malware.
Free scanners do have their limitations, however, as they are only able to scan your website at the browser level. For a more thorough scan, consider scanning your server for malware as well, since attackers are known to conceal website backdoors, credit card skimmers, and phishing pages at the server level.
To scan your entire website and server for malware, sign up for the Sucuri Platform or a similar service that offers comprehensive malware scanning.
5. Update your software and harden your environment
Once you’ve addressed the malware infection and ensured that your website is free of malware, you’ll want to take additional measures to prevent it from happening again.
Follow these steps to harden your environment and prevent reinfection:
- Update all of your plugins, themes, and other website software with the latest security patches
- Use 2FA on your admin panel and restrict access to sensitive website pages
- Use strong and unique passwords for all of your accounts
- Isolate websites to prevent lateral movement and cross-site contamination
- Use a website firewall to protect your site from hackers and vulnerability exploits
Handling a manual cleanup can be painstaking, as malware can present differently depending on various factors. But if you’re vigilant and systematic, you can get your website cleaned and back up running. But please, don’t forget to make that backup first!
Option 2: Remove website malware via a professional service provider
If you don’t want the hassle of removing website malware or simply need a hand cleaning up an infection, you can reach out to a reputable website malware removal service. This is a quick and effective way to tackle a malware infection head-on.
During this process, the website analyst will use FTP or SSH to access your website and clean up the malware infection from your files, database, and server. Not only will they help you address the issue, but they’ll also provide you with a detailed report of their findings to share with your hosting provider.
Here are the steps to clean up malware from your site:
- Choose a reputable website security provider. Sucuri offers effective malware cleanup bundled with a web application firewall to help protect your site and prevent reinfection.
- Obtain a list of infected files from your host. This should be provided to you as a .txt file and will include all files identified as suspicious by your hosting provider.
- Grant access to your website. You will need to provide access to the website security provider. Sucuri can help you with this process and provide steps for FTP, SSH, or cPanel access.
- Create a support ticket. Outline the issue and create a malware removal request to address the infection. The incident response team will create a secure backup of your website and perform baseline scanning.
- Wait for malware cleanup results. Malware cleanup could take several hours depending on your plan. Once your website is clean, Sucuri will submit review requests to remove blocklisting and rectify the issue with your host.
Going with a trusted service like Sucuri is more than a quick fix, it’s a step towards lasting peace of mind.
Once your site is clean, Sucuri applies comprehensive monitoring and website firewall to help shield your site from potential threats. Think of it as a one-stop security shop — it scans, cleans, and protects your site, keeping it safe now and into the future.
How to fix account suspensions due to server resource usage
On your hosting provider’s server, your website is likely one among hundreds (or even thousands) sharing the same resources — things like processing power, memory, and storage. To ensure fair distribution, web hosts cap these resources for each account.
If your website happens to exceed the limits for your plan, they might send warnings before suspending your account. If you’ve seen such alerts, it’s high time to take a close look at your hosting usage.
Pinpoint the reason for high server resource usage
To begin, ask yourself:
- What’s driving my site’s high resource consumption?
- Is it a sudden surge, or has it been gradually increasing?
- Do my analytics reflect this increased resource use?
- Is my hosting plan sufficient for the amount of traffic that my website receives?
Once you’ve established a baseline understanding of your resource usage, you’ll want to check for the source of the issue.
Check for website malware
When it comes to sudden spikes, check if you’re dealing with bot traffic or malware; both are known to gobble up resources. While some bots (like Google’s googlebot) behave themselves, bad bots can cause a ruckus, scraping data, attempting brute force attacks, and creating SEO spam.
Malware, too, can overwhelm your site and use up resources. Although most web hosts use basic malware scanners, they might miss some types of malware, causing an unexpected resource drain.
Furthermore, if you’ve recently suffered from a blackhat SEO spam infection, this may cause a large increase in pages crawled by Googlebot, usually returning thousands of 404 Not Found errors in your site analytics. This can oftentimes overwhelm a website’s resources so you may need to manually adjust the Googlebot crawl rate.
Troubleshoot your plugins and themes
You might also be dealing with resource-heavy plugins or themes. Diagnosing this can be challenging as most web hosts don’t provide intricate resource usage data. One way to determine the culprit is to deactivate plugins and themes one by one, but it’s a time-inefficient method that may require a developer’s help.
Switch hosting plans or providers
As a quick solution, you can move to another plan or hosting provider with more generous resources (providing you have backups), which will help to get your website back online swiftly.
Implement caching
Implementing a cache for your website can help too. It reduces the number of server requests by storing your website locally or on a global network of proxy servers (CDNs) so that content can load without contacting your server every time. While caching is primarily a method to hasten website load times, it can considerably reduce server requests. The Sucuri firewall does a fantastic job of reducing load times and caching your site.
Finally, while you may be tempted to upgrade your plan, remember that more resources won’t necessarily solve the root issue of high usage. To tackle bots, for instance, you’ll need a firewall, not just more bandwidth.
Solving account suspensions due to payment failures
Your hosting provider typically charges a stored credit card automatically whenever it’s time for renewal. But for various reasons — such as lack of funds, expired cards, or fraud prevention — these transactions can sometimes fail.
In such cases, you’ll receive an email indicating that the transaction could not be completed and requesting updated payment information. For yearly subscriptions, you’ll also receive reminder emails well in advance of the due date.
One of the most common causes behind an account suspension is simply a lapsed payment. The solution is straightforward: simply make the payment to your host and your website will be restored and back online.
Fixing an account suspension due to policy violation
Let’s face it: it’s easy to click “I agree” without thoroughly reading through the policies. Most of us assume our activities are likely permitted under these policies. But assumptions can sometimes lead to unintentional policy violations. Now we’re left rummaging through those seldom-read documents.
In our experience, a significant number of policy violations occur because of the content on the website. It’s crucial to understand that hosting providers have comprehensive policies outlining what content types are permissible on your website.
Suspensions may happen due to copyright infringements, spam creation, unsolicited emails, unauthorized admin use, or storing illegal content on the server. Some hosts may also have policies regarding political content or the sale of certain pharmaceutical products.
While it can be frustrating, policy enforcement is a reality in the world of website hosting. A proactive approach involves understanding your hosting provider’s policies from the onset to mitigate potential issues down the line.
If you believe that your host has acted in error and you have not violated any policies or Terms of Use, you should reach out to them and provide a detailed response clearly outlining why you believe it was wrong to suspend your domain.
How to remove account suspension warnings
To remove an account suspended warning, you first need to rectify the problem that resulted in the suspension. Afterwards, directly contact your web host with a detailed request to assess the suspension cause again.
Take efforts to ensure your request is accurate and relevant, clearly representing the actions you’ve taken to resolve the problem. The more information you provide to your host, the better they will understand the context and be able to assist you.
You can also make additional efforts to strengthen your website security, such as updating your themes and plugins or installing a web application firewall or security plugin. Doing so demonstrates to your web host your commitment to maintaining a secure website.
Why does my web host care if I have website malware?
Your hosting provider has a vested interest in protecting your website visitors and hosting environment from threats like website malware. Malware creates a ripple effect, impacting everyone from you, the website admin, to your visitors, hosting company, and even search engines like Google.
A hacked website may trick people into revealing sensitive information like passwords or credit card numbers, or spread malicious downloads and ransomware infections.
There are substantial risks and potential losses for a web host with hacked websites:
- Infected websites often consume more resources due to reasons like bot traffic or brute force attacks. This can hinder the performance of other websites sharing the same server in shared hosting scenarios.
- There may be a security risk for other sites hosted on the same server, despite protective measures.
- The host’s IP addresses can get blacklisted as firewalls detect malware from their servers. This, coupled with your site potentially being used to infect others, only adds to the concerns.
- Cloud providers and data centers issue warnings for infected servers.
- Internet Service Providers (ISPs) impose harsh penalties for malware detected on their servers.
In essence, a web host’s reputation and revenue can be at stake when they host a malware-infected website. Therefore, hosts are motivated to take quick action against malware on hosted websites.
What is the impact of a hosting account suspension?
The repercussions of an account suspension can be substantial and varied, affecting different aspects of your online presence:
Downtime and user experience
Downtime is the most obvious and immediate impact of a suspension. Your website becomes inaccessible to all users, damaging their experience and potentially leaving a negative impression. This can particularly affect e-commerce websites where uninterrupted 24/7 access is critical for transactions.
Loss of revenue
With your online operations disrupted, you may suffer a direct loss of revenue, particularly if your website serves as an online store, a booking platform, or offers other paid services.
Reputation damage
When visitors encounter a “This account has been suspended” message, it can damage your brand’s reputation, causing loss of trust and confidence in your platform.
SEO rankings
Extended downtime can also affect your website’s search engine rankings. Search engines aim to provide the best user experience, and a non-functioning website doesn’t meet that standard. Prolonged unavailability might even lead to de-indexing by search engines.
A suspended website account is a potentially severe issue that can bring about short and long-term consequences. Therefore, addressing any issues leading to potential suspension swiftly and efficiently is crucial to maintaining the health (and success) of your site.
The bottom line: overcoming account suspensions from your web host
Getting hit with a hosting account suspension is an alarming experience. While it puts your website on a temporary hiatus, it’s crucial to understand it’s not the end. There are various reasons for a suspension, including malware infections, excessive resource usage, unpaid hosting bills, or policy violations. Depending on the reason, the steps to get your site back up will vary.
We’ve covered the common causes, how to address each, and the preventative measures you can adopt to safeguard against potential suspensions. We’ve also discussed the potential repercussions of an account suspension, including downtime, loss of revenue, damage to reputation, and drops in SEO rankings.
And if your account suspension is due to malware, partnering with a trusted service like Sucuri can help you get ahead of such issues. Sucuri digs deeper than the obvious problem, providing comprehensive monitoring and website firewall solutions to fend off possible threats.
Ultimately, your hosting provider wants to keep its servers secure, and taking these steps can reinforce your site’s security, benefiting you, your host, and your site visitors.
Always remember: the key is swift action. Whether it’s making a lapsed payment, upgrading your hosting plan, or scanning your site for malware — acting promptly can get your site back online faster and keep it running smoothly.
![Malware comes in many different varieties. Analyst Krasimir Konov is on this month’s Sucuri Sit-Down to help keep them all straight. From malicious iframes to SEO spam, join host Justin Channell as he racks Krasimir’s brain on all the different types of malware. Also, Krasimir discusses his recent blog post about a malicious cURL downloader, and Justin breaks down the latest website security news, including patched plugins you should update. Podcast Transcript Justin Channell: Hello, and welcome to the Sucuri Sit Down. I'm your host, Justin Channell, and this is a monthly podcast about website security, where we get in-depth with the malware removal experts here at Sucuri. Later in the show, I'll have our analyst Krasimir Konov to chat about some different types of malware, but first, let's take a look at other topics we've published on our blog and Sucuri labs notes this month. First up, we have some new information about credit card skimming with hackers using a hybrid method to steal payment information from eCommerce websites. Our analyst Dennis Sinegubko wrote about this for the Sucuri blog back at the beginning of June. Now, most credit card stealing malware is a client side JavaScript that grabs data and sends it to a third party server. But, that approach has a drawback for bad actors because it's still possible to track the requests and catch them as being suspicious. Now, to get around that, bad actors have started harvesting information server side by modifying core PHP files. In this case, the infection would be undetectable from the outside, but it's still going to be pretty easy to find because you're rarely modifying any of those core files, so any of those changes that are going to come up are going to be suspicious. To get around both of these drawbacks, we're seeing bad actors combine the two. So client side snippets of JavaScript are sending stolen credit card data to server side scripts that they've installed on the same server as the site. Now, this allows bad actors to cover their tracks a little bit because the traffic that's being redirected is going to the same server, and that's less likely to be flagged as suspicious. It's a bit more complicated to pull this off, but our team has been seeing this hybrid approach in the wild, so it's something to be on the lookout for. Now, another month has passed, and we found more cross site scripting attacks targeting WordPress plugins. Most notably, we discovered one that affects users of the YITH WooCommerce Ajax Product Filter plugin. Now, this is a plugin that allows WooCommerce stores to be filtered by product type, and it's pretty popular. It's got about 100,000 users right now, so with it being vulnerable, it's very important that all of them update to the latest version, which is 3.11.1. Some of the other plugins we found cross site scripting vulnerabilities with included Elementor Page Builder, Careerfy, JobSearch, and Newspaper. If you're looking for a full list of vulnerabilities that have been patched this month, John Castro at the Sucuri Labs blog has you covered. Check out our show notes for the link. Also, this month I had a blog go up detailing what's called a jibberish hack. It's basically the same motivation as an SEO spam attack where bad actors use your site's good standing to redirect visitors to their own sites. But in this attack, you'll find a bunch of randomly named folders filled with a ton of HTML files with really nonsensical file names like cheap-cool-hairstyles-photos.html. It's just going to be a mishmash of keywords that clearly you didn't put there. Unfortunately, just deleting all those HTML files and folders is not going to be enough to get rid of that jibberish hack though. You're going to need to fully clean any hacked files and database tables, and then you're going to have to deal with all the damage caused to your site's standing. And just keep in mind, if you find anything about that process too daunting, we're always here to help. Now, for this month's Sit Down, we have Sucuri analyst Krasimir Konov. Earlier in June, he had written a lab's note about a malicious downloader script that used the curl function, and we chatted a bit about it, but more importantly, we went really in-depth on all the different varieties of malware that website owners need to be aware of. But, before I get started with Krasimir, I just wanted to remind you about the Sucuri Sync-Up, our sister podcast. It's a weekly website security news briefing that you can find anywhere you get your podcasts, as well as the video version on our social media feed, and now you can even get it on your Amazon Alexa smart speakers. Just search Amazon skills for Sucuri Sync-Up, add the flash briefing, and get new content delivered every Monday. Now, on with the show. Hi Krasimir, thanks for joining us on the show. I thought we could start off and maybe have you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do here at Sucuri? Krasimir Konov: Yeah, sure. Well, I joined Sucuri originally in 2014, but I've been in the IT business for about 10 years. Nine of those I did security. And currently at Sucuri I'm one of the malware analysts. I used to work in the front lines, used to clean websites and whatnot, and then I gradually moved up, and now I'm working in the malware research department. And my day to day job is basically analyzing malware, and then once I analyze it and figure out what it is, then I will create a signature for it. And we'll add those signatures to our tools, so we can automate some of the work we do. And I also write some Labs Notes blog posts. Usually, if I find something interesting in malware or some security topic, I'll write about it. Justin Channell: Yeah. And of those topics recently that you wrote about, one was about a malicious curl downloader, and how exactly did that work? Krasimir Konov: Right, yeah. That was an interesting one, but not very unique or anything like that. We see that a lot with curl being used as a downloader. It's a very common malware. So rather than including the actual malware in the file, the attackers would use curl to download the malicious code. In this case, they'll download it from Pastebin, but it could be anything. It could be another website or anything like that, and curl would just make a call to the website, request the code. The website will respond with the code, and then later on, there is some code to either save the output somewhere on the website, or you'll just run it through eval and execute the actual code right away. Justin Channell: Right. And you said that it's commonly found in malware, but let's kind of maybe talk a bit broader about malware in general. What is everything that is classified as malware? Krasimir Konov: Well, in general it will be anything that the owner of the website didn't authorize, anything that was added by a third party. There is a lot of different malware. It could be even something like a defacement that will also be considered malware because it was something the user did not authorize. Even though it might not be doing anything malicious on the website, it's not infecting users, the visit is still something they did not authorize. So defacement would also be considered malware. And even something like ransomware where the website is technically not really damaged, it's all encrypted, but it's not infecting anybody. It's not doing anything malicious, but it's still encrypting the entire website and asking the user or the customer, the owner of the website for a ransom they need to pay in order to get the website back online. Justin Channell: Okay. Let's maybe break it down to each individual type of malware. For example, what would be a way that maybe I-frames could be maliciously used by a hacker? Krasimir Konov: Yeah. An I-frame can be used maliciously when it loads content from another location. You can look at the I-frame as a window that just opens another website. So anything that website has on it, you're pretty much loading it through the I-frame. So if that website is infected and it's serving some kind of malware, by opening an I-frame, you're loading all those elements, everything that was on this website. And sometimes the I-frame can be as small as pixel or something hidden somewhere off the screen, so you wouldn't even know that it was opening it. Justin Channell: And yeah, I feel like we've also seen a lot of them where they're used almost to mimic popups as well. Krasimir Konov: Yeah. I mean the I-frame, it could just load from another website and the other website could do anything. It could be serving just malware and it would try to infect the user that doesn't even know that they're being connected to the other website. It could just have some other JavaScript that's just trying to open up pop ups on the original website through the I-frame. Yeah, it could be a lot of things. Justin Channell: Okay. And also, let's talk a little bit about conditional redirects and how those work. What allows a script to detect which devices are coming in and where they're coming from? Krasimir Konov: Right. Yeah. That's a common one we see a lot. Basically, a conditional redirect would be something, it's a redirect on the website. It's obviously malicious, but there's certain conditions that need to be met before the redirect is actually executed or the redirect happens. For example, let's say if it's on a phishing website or a phishing page that is hidden somewhere on the website. For example, if Google visits it, obviously the attacker doesn't want Google to see the actual phishing page and record it as a phishing page. So they'll look for, for example, the IP address. They would look for the user agent. And a lot of times they can tell that it's a bot. So they'll just return a 404 response, for example, that will be like, "Oh, page not found." So Google would be like, "Oh, it looks like this page doesn't exist." But then if a regular user goes to the same page, then those conditions will be met. The actual website or the script behind the phishing will check and see, and be like, "Oh, this one is running Firefox or Chrome," and be like, okay. And then they'll look at the IP and be like, "Oh, he's in whatever, he's in United States somewhere." And he's like, "Oh, okay. That's good." And then once all of these conditions are met, then the actual script will serve them the actual phishing page. And it'll be like, "Oh, you need to fill out this to recover your account or whatever, or type in your credentials to log in here." Justin Channell: And so this is the type of thing we're really, a website owner is going to run into this more commonly when people are complaining about they're getting served bad content or whatever, and they can't seem to replicate it. It's likely probably these kind of redirects. Is that right? Krasimir Konov: Right, right. It could be something as specific as, for example, a range of IP addresses that correspond to an ISP or maybe let's say a country. It could be like, "Oh, were targeting only customers in the US," so if you're connecting from another country and you go to the same website or the same page, it would just say 404. It will give you a page not found. But then if you actually have an IP address from the United States, you're connecting from the United States, then it will actually show you the phishing page. Justin Channell: Now another type of malware I feel like we see a lot here is SEO spam. We hear people talking about that. What are some of the top SEO spam keywords that you see coming through? Krasimir Konov: Yeah. We get that a lot. We see a lot of spam on websites. A lot of times attackers will use SEO spam to gain ranking for their own website. Or they'll just try to include some kind of SEO spam in links to another website that they're currently running or something. I mean, these things change all the time. So a website might be up for a week and then it'll disappear, and then they'll start another campaign. But yeah, we see that a lot. We see all kinds of keywords they use. Most common ones will be something like Viagra. We'll have like jerseys for sale. A lot of times, they'll use name brands like Nike, Rolex, Prada. We've seen even some essay writing services for some reason. I'm not sure why, but that's common. We see, for example, pharmaceuticals a lot that will use specific medicine names. They'll use all kinds of replicas, like a replica bag of this, replica this, replica that. We'd see prescription, also payday loans. And obviously there's some adult related sites and things like that keywords. Justin Channell: So pretty much anything that people are going to be searching and clicking on are probably going to be targets for SEO spam? Krasimir Konov: Right. I think a lot of it commonly is pharma related because a lot of people are looking to buy medicine online, and a lot of times will require a prescription. So a lot of people are like, "Oh, let me see if I can find this medicine that I can buy it online somewhere." They don't need a prescription. They don't want to pay to visit a doctor and whatnot, and they'll look for it. And yeah. Justin Channell: Now, whenever somebody's website does get hacked with a SEO spam attack, what kind of effect can it have on the website beyond just being defaced? Krasimir Konov: Yeah. You can have a lot of things can happen, negative things. For example, the website can be blacklisted because of the keywords. And that usually represents a big red warning when you go on the website, depending on who blacklisted it. But if it's Google, for example, you'll see a big warning and it'll tell you this website contains malware or there's something wrong with this website. So, pretty much all the traffic on the website will be gone. And then you can also lose a lot of your reputation if there is a SEO spam on the website. For example, if you were ranked in say number five for certain keywords that represent your product on Google search engines, and then suddenly you get hit with SEO spam, then all these search engines then go and visit the website. And all of a sudden they're like, "Oh, there's all these weird key words on here, all this SEO spam that's causing a lot of mixed signals." And the search engines are like, "Oh, where do we rank this website now? Do we rank them with this product that's originally what the website is about? Or do we take into consideration all these other keywords that are mixed up that are SEO spam?" So, all of a sudden your website might go from being ranked number five on the first page to being on the 10th page. And then you rank for all these other keywords that you didn't intend to. And then people search for something completely different. They're searching for jerseys or something, or now they're searching for Prada products, and then suddenly your website pops up in there. So you're not really getting any good traffic, not targeted traffic. But, yeah. Justin Channell: Okay. So in a lot of ways, the effects of SEO spam would kind of be the same for defacements or any kind of malware with the blacklisting, but it does bring that kind of unique part to it where then it can also then bring traffic that you weren't expecting from somebody searching for jerseys, for example. I had not really ever thought about that. Krasimir Konov: Right, right. Yeah. It will definitely bring some traffic. I've seen a lot of times where websites will be connected. Let's say, there was 1,000 websites that were all infected with SEO spam, and it will kind of link each other to try to bring each other up into the rankings. And so you would see a lot of strange traffic from some random websites that were, for example, that were previously infected, even if they might not be anymore. But yeah, they'll be sending traffic to you or there'll be usually search engines sending you traffic, but for the wrong keywords. People are looking for something else, so obviously they're not going to be interested in your website. They're not going to buy anything because they're not looking for that. Justin Channell: And now, so thinking of the way websites get infected, a very common way it seems to be is through phishing campaigns. What are some recommendations you have for the best ways to avoid becoming a phishing victim? Krasimir Konov: Yeah. There is some ways. I mean, it depends really on the type of attack. Obviously, a lot of people, when they think of phishing, they think, "Oh, it's just like a PayPal phishing page and it just looks like the original," but it could be more subtle. If it's just a regular page where you're just going and you get redirected to another website, obviously the first thing to look is if you have the security padlocks, make sure that traffic is encrypted. A lot of these websites don't really have any encryption nowadays. More are starting to get that with pre SSLs being issued and whatnot. But that's the first thing to look and see, make sure. Anywhere you're typing your sensitive information, you want to make sure you have the padlock to make sure everything is encrypted. Krasimir Konov: But also you want to look at the URL of the actual website you're visiting. A lot of times they'll try to hide it. So you might have to be careful and look closely. Something that might be an I will be an L or something like that. And a capital I and L might look kind of similar into your IRL, so you might miss something like that. Say, if you're looking for PayPal and it might replace the L with an I, and if you don't look closely, it might look exactly the same. And you're like, "Oh, okay, it's paypal.com," but not really. So yeah. Just pay attention to the URL, make sure it is the actual website. There's no paypal.com dot something, dot something else, dot com. Yeah. You want it to just say paypal.com, and then it'll have forward slash and something else. But yeah, it gets more complicated when you have, for example, a phishing page that's injected into a regular page. For example, you have a checkout page on a website that you're buying things from and you go through the checkout page and you're looking at where you type in your credit card information and whatnot. And you might have a phishing page that actually looks exactly like a little box that gives you where you put in your credit card number, or your name, your address, and all that. So that will be more subtle. For example, that could be also an I-frame that's just coming from another page. And it will look exactly like it's part of the website. You're on the legitimate website, but only that portion of the website is actually the phishing page. And you look at it and you're like, "Oh, okay. It looks fine. I'm just putting my credentials." So that one could be a lot harder to figure it out. Usually, if it's something like that, I look for something that looks kind of out of place. Maybe they didn't get the right font. It might not be the same as the original website or there might be something out of place, some fields that are missing or some fields that are squished into the left or the right. It looks kind of awkward. It's like, why would this be like this? The whole website looks professional. There's a pink background or something, for example, and then suddenly there's this white box in the middle. It's like, ah, it looks kind of weird, out of place. Justin Channell: So pretty much if anything looks slightly out of place, you really should double check everything at that point. Krasimir Konov: Right. Right. Yeah. Obviously there's more ways that you can check, but I wouldn't get into more technical, like inspecting elements and looking at stuff, but yeah. Justin Channell: And now another type of malware that's kind of, and it kind of plays in with whatever the other infection is, is backdoors. Can you give us some examples of what backdoors can be? It's mainly just when a hacker can get back into the site to reinfect it, but I know there are a ton of different methods. And what are some of the more common ones and then maybe some that really interesting that you've seen? Krasimir Konov: Yeah, there is a lot. They'll probably be one of the first things the hacker would do is if they compromise a website, obviously they'll try to spread backdoors and just inject code everywhere so they can get back in, even if the owner of the website or webmaster cleans it. They want to try and hide some malicious code somewhere so they can always get back in. There's many variations. A backdoor could be something as simple as a single line of code to just [inaudible 00:20:19] argument, some kind of string or something via get or post. Krasimir Konov: And then it runs into an eval, so it evaluates the code and executes it. And some backdoors are very complex and they can be included in, let's say you have a WordPress site and you have a specific login page where all the login credentials are being processed and everything else. They could even inject code into that to basically bypass the whole login mechanism so that they can just bypass everything. They don't even have to know any user. They don't have to know the password, nothing. They'll just include some lines in there, and every time they'll be just able to log in. Yeah. It gets pretty crazy. Yeah. I mean, there's all kinds of malware. There is always a malware, for example, that just targets credit cards and will just target the eCommerce websites. And they'll just try to steal the login credentials, I mean, the credit cards. They'll try to get your address, your credit card information, any kind of CVV code or whatever you typed into the billing address, everything. And then there's also malware like the backdoors that are just trying to keep the attacker in control and trying to get them back into the website. There's just so many variations of what a malicious user might want to do on a website. Some can be something as simple as just reinfecting the website. They don't want to keep control. They just want to keep reinfecting it with some kind of malware. So even if you clean it, it would just get reinfected. Some of them in the database, otherwise might be in the files. We've seen some added into a [inaudible 00:22:14] job that just keeps running on the server. There could be malware that is just a giant to, for example, attack out of websites. Like for example, a distributed denial service where they put the same malware on thousands of websites. And then they try to send traffic to one website to try to bring it down. Yeah. People try to do all kinds of stuff with websites. We've seen even some cryptocurrency mining malware that you go onto a website and suddenly your PC starts running like crazy. And you're like, what the hell is going on? Your fans turn on and the PC is 100% CPU. And it turns out that the website has some malware that's just by mining Bitcoins with your CPU and it's using all of it. Justin Channell: Wow. Okay. So one question now, the last question I have is of all the malware that you've seen, what do you think is the coolest piece of malware that you've ever seen? Krasimir Konov: I think the coolest would be the ones that are so subtle that you don't even know that it's there. For example, we've seen some that were pretty innovative. It will be just a one liner code that's just one line. And for example, it will be let's say 40-50 characters, something like that. And that's all it is. And they'll hide it somewhere in between the legitimate code. And if you don't know what you're looking for, you would never see it. It doesn't look suspicious. There is no links to some other website. There's no some kind of encrypted code or anything like that. It's just a simple one line. And then if you're just scrolling through the file looking for something, you would never see it. It just looks like all the other code. And then if you look closely, you're like, "Oh, there's this..." Look closely, and you're like, "Oh wow, this is not supposed to be there." And then you keep looking at it and you're like, "This looks really weird." And then you see that it's actually doing some malicious things and trying to evaluate some code or taking output from the outside, I mean, some input from outside, you can call it and give it code to run. Justin Channell: Well, Krasimir, thanks for coming on and talking to us for today. Krasimir Konov: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I'm so happy. I'm glad I was able to do this podcast and I can't wait to do another one. Justin Channell: Yeah, we'll have you on again. Thanks. Krasimir Konov: Thank you. Justin Channell: Thanks again to Krasimir for joining us here on the Sit Down. We'll be back with another episode next month. So be sure to subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or any podcasting platform. Also, be sure to follow us on social media at Sucuri Security and check us out at sucuri.net. That's S-U-C-U-R-I.net. I'm Justin Channell, And this has been the Sucuri Sit Down. Stay safe out there.](https://blog.sucuri.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20-sucuri-podcast-blog-post_blog_image-390x183.jpg)
Justin Channell
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Luke Leal
Ashley Sand
Juliana Lewis
Ben Martin
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