A note to my valued clients and website visitors: Recently, the Best SEO Web Design hosting server was hacked and a malicious malware script infected literally dozens of my websites, as well as several of my client’s sites that I was hosting on that server.
The malware was discovered when a client contacted me through my Facebook account, to let me know that their AVG software was flagging the site as malicious. Within 24 hours, the infection spread to all the websites on my server and upon trying to visit any of these sites, the web surfer was greeted with a page that looks similar to the thumbnail above, warning them that the site had malware and could potentially harm their computer.
There are many new anti-virus and anti-spyware, malware software programs that are reporting clean sites as malicious due to what is called a “false positive”, which means that like most software it screwed up. In this case, my first course of action was to make sure that sites on my server were not being inaccurately flagged by a false positive, but unfortunately in this case, the warning was justified and the malware was real.
I attempted to remove the malicious script manually without resolve and investigated employing several server side anti-malware routines that may have been able to salvage the sites by destroying the malware, unfortunately the malware was irreversible and the only sure fix was to delete all infected files, which within just 2 days nearly 90% of all the files on the server were infected and had to be deleted.
What happens next? I am tirelessly attempting to resolve the issue. This may take several days because of the scale of the situation. I have local copies of all the websites, however they have to be scanned for malware as well. Once confirmed that they are clean, I can recreate the directory and upload the site again. I will have to monitor the fresh upload to ensure that it remains free of malware. This process is multiplied by the 3 years worth of websites that resided on the server. Needless to say, this is a monumental task.
For those clients who were benefiting from free domain registration and / or free website hosting, I will no longer be able to provide these free services.
If you are a client of mine, who now has a website that is not functional, it is because the website has been deleted from my server. In this case, YOU will need to provide your own hosting and domain registrar services. I recommend GoDaddy.com for these services. I will explain the procedure below:
- If you do not already have a domain registrar or hosting service, go to http://godaddy.com and create a new account and purchase a hosting plan. For a single site, choose the Economy Linux plan. For multiple websites choose the Deluxe Linux plan.
- Email me your registrar and hosting account information including the customer number, username, password.
- I will transfer the domain to your account and / or upload your website to your hosting server.
Again, thank you for your patience in this matter.
Todd Donald
*** Please keep in mind that during this time, I am unable to respond as quickly to emails and telephone calls. I will be leaving my Facebook open to try and respond to general questions in real time.
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