How To Check Your Website for Malware Infections

In our Wordfence 2023 State of WordPress Security Report, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team reported malicious files were found on roughly 1.1 million WordPress sites in 2023.

Since then, malware has continued to be one of the fastest-growing cybersecurity threats, with 41% of companies experiencing a malware attack in 2024.

Malicious code on your website can result in consequences that include:

Defacement (changing the content on your website)
Downtime
Data theft
Financial loss
Damage to your reputation

While we agree that prevention is always better than detection or remediation, we believe website owners and developers should know how to check a website for malware to ensure early detection, minimize the impact of an attack, and improve website security.

In this article, we’ll cover how to check a website for malware, what steps to take if you find malware, and the best practices for protecting your website from future attacks.

Article Contents:

How To Check A Website For Malware
What To Do if You Detect Malware on Your Website
Best Practices for Protecting Your Website from Malware Infections

How To Check a Website for Malware

If you’re worried about malware on your website or just looking to be proactive, here are some steps you can take to run a security check on your website.

You can also visit our learning center, which has a section dedicated to malware removal guides.

1. Look for Indicators of Compromise (IoC)

Knowing signs of malware, also known as indicators of compromise (IoC), can tip you off to potential security attacks on your website.

Issues to keep an eye out for include:

Website defacement
Website freezing or crashing
Login information changed without your consent
Website files deleted or changed without your consent
Sudden negative search engine optimization (SEO) impacts, such as a rapid drop in traffic, loss in rankings, or blocklist status

Common Indicators of Compromise on a website.

If you experience any of these issues, you can perform a more in-depth scan to determine whether malware is the cause.

Even if these indicators aren’t present, it’s a good idea to use malware detection tools to identify threats before they impact your website experience or compromise user data.

2. Run Your URL Through a Website Malware Scanner

One quick way to see if your website contains malicious code is to run your URL through a free malware checker.

There are many options available, such as Google’s Transparency Report.

To test your website, go to Google’s Safe Browsing site status tool and enter your URL in the search bar underneath “Check site status.”

Google’s Safe Browsing site status can help you check your website for malware.

Click the search icon to run the scan and see your results.

If the results show that unsafe content was found, you can use a security plugin or CLI tool to locate the malicious code and remedy the problems.

3. Use a Malware Detection Plugin

Security plugins are an excellent way to detect, remedy, and prevent malware on your website.

For example, if you use WordPress, Wordfence offers free and premium website scanners that help you detect and remedy various types of malware, including backdoors and shells.

If you’re concerned about malicious software, you can run a manual Wordfence security check, which scans all the files on your WordPress site to identify malicious code.

Both free and premium versions offer a full scan of your website, but Wordfence Premium gives you access to the latest malware signatures and malicious domains in real time. The standard scan is recommended for most websites, but you can easily customize it to check for additional signs like blocklist status, URLs linked to phishing, and malicious redirects.

Check out the video below for an in-depth walkthrough on scanning your WordPress website with Wordfence.

If your website contains malicious code, the scan results will show it and recommended actions to remedy the situation. In addition to detecting malware, Wordfence’s firewalls actively help you prevent attacks.

In 2023, Wordfence blocked more than 100 billion credit stuffing attacks from more than 74 million distinct IP addresses.

4. Level Up Your Security With a Command Line Malware Detection Tool

Wordfence CLI builds upon the solid foundation of the Wordfence Security plugin by allowing users to run security scans via the command line. This helps them mitigate tampering concerns as the Wordfence CLI is highly efficient, providing a significant boost in scanning performance.

Using a command line detection tool like Wordfence CLI is an excellent choice for individuals comfortable with the command line.

It’s also a great option for site cleaners, developers with multiple customers, and hosting companies who need a high performance malware scanner that can handle a large number of files.

Wordfence CLI can scan your website for malware at the server level.

In addition to improved malware detection, tools like Wordfence CLI allow for extended use cases. You can use it to scan backups outside the webroot to ensure their integrity before restoring them or to more thoroughly scan for database infections by running it against database exports.

Moreover, CLI can be used to quickly scan your most recently modified files by piping the results from the Linux find command to the Wordfence CLI scanner or you could create a cron job in Linux to periodically scan your website’s files..

Wordfence CLI is open-source and can be fully customized or forked. Wordfence CLI Free offers signatures delayed by 30 days. If you want real-time signature releases, that’s available with Wordfence CLI Premium.

Remember that most infections involve multiple malicious components. With Wordfence CLI’s free option, you can detect more than 18 million unique malware variants in the wild and receive the latest signatures after a 30 day delay.

What To Do if You Detect Malware on Your Website

If your scans detect malware, you want to take steps to assess the scope of the attack, limit the damage, and remove malware from the hacked site.

Cleaning Your Website With Wordfence

If you find malicious code in your search, you can clean your hacked WordPress website with the help of Wordfence’s security plugin, which offers malware remediation tools at both the free and paid levels.

First, you want to cover the basic steps of securing your WordPress site:

Upgrade WordPress, themes, and plugins to their latest versions.
Change passwords.
Back up your website.

Once those are done, make sure you have Wordfence installed. If you haven’t installed it yet, you can follow along with this easy step-by-step video tutorial. Next, go to the Wordfence “Scan” menu and select “Start Scan.”

Wordfence malware scan results.

You’ll get a list of results that shows your website’s vulnerabilities, such as out of date themes and plugins.

The report will also show changed files, which can help you identify when hackers or cybercriminals with malicious intent have made alterations to your website.

You can work through each issue one by one on your own or use Wordfence’s one-click repair and delete functions for quicker cleaning.

That said, you want to be careful not to delete files that are necessary for your website. So, it’s always good to review the list of files in the report before selecting the one-click delete option.

Responsible Remediation

Cleaning your website is an excellent start to remediation (identifying and addressing detected threats to prevent damage), but infections can reoccur if you don’t address the root cause of your issues. While fully automated remediation solutions can be helpful, it’s important not to let them create a false sense of security.

Ultimately, the best way to limit damage and prevent future breaches is to ensure that a human always makes final remediation decisions.

Tools to automate remediation can be incredibly useful, but fully automated remediation can cause more problems than it solves while providing a false sense of security — there should always be a human making final remediation decisions.

This is why our Wordfence Care and Wordfence Response offerings use skilled analysts to clean your website and get it back into working order.

We highly recommend these services to less experienced site owners or those who simply want to trust the experts to handle remediation.

Best Practices for Protecting Your Website from Malware Infections

In recent years, the WordPress community has seen a shift in emphasis towards prevention, rather than detection, of security incidents. This reflects the increased adoption of best practices such as multi-factor authentication, vulnerability management, and configuration hardening.

Here are some steps to protect your website and choose a security provider that will help you prevent attacks and malware.

Adopt a Vigilant Mindset

In the realm of cyber security when you have a vigilant mindset, you take the approach that cyberattacks will happen instead of thinking they might happen, and you plan accordingly.

While it might seem pessimistic, having a vigilant mindset leads to a more preemptive approach to threat detection and gives you ample time to develop a well-thought-out incident response plan that reduces impact and loss.

As part of this critical mindset, you can:

Encrypt sensitive information
Provide your team with security training
Implement continuous website monitoring
Simulate breaches and have incident response drills
Improve identity management with tools like multifactor identification

Opt for Layered Security

It’s impossible to eliminate risk completely; you can only manage it. From that perspective, it’s important to realize that no single security solution will ever be perfect.

One of the most effective ways to manage risk is to layer defenses so that bypassing any one layer does not allow an attacker to take complete control.

This is why we recommend using our Web Application Firewall (WAF) in addition to cloud-based solutions.

While a cloud solution would be well-suited to providing DDOS protection and blocking some generic attacks, our WAF benefits from running with the plugin because it can block attacks specifically targeted against WordPress vulnerabilities without unnecessarily blocking legitimate administrative traffic.

Our team has deployed hundreds of firewall rules to protect your site against common attacks, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and malicious file uploads.

Many of the privilege escalation and authentication bypass vulnerabilities we see have parameters and values that require specialized experience and techniques to block adequately.

Layering security with a web application firewall and network firewall.

For instance, many privilege escalation vulnerabilities, such as the one we found in the JupiterX theme, make use of administrative functionality that has been accidentally exposed to low-level users, often via an AJAX action.

With a generic ruleset from ModSecurity, attacks of this type couldn’t be blocked without entirely breaking most site functionality.

Even the most advanced cloud firewalls able to scan POST parameters by terminating TLS at the edge would still prevent administrative users from performing necessary tasks.

With our custom firewall rules, Wordfence can easily block malicious traffic without impacting site functionality. Thanks to our expert in-house vulnerability researchers and Wordfence Intelligence Bug Bounty Program, we’re often the first to release firewall rules for new critical vulnerabilities.

Schedule Website Scans and Backups

In addition to running manual scans, the Wordfence plugin will run regular malware scans and send notifications if it detects any security issues.

By automating your malware scans, you don’t have to wait until you notice signs of compromise to check your website. Instead, you can increase the chance of detecting attacks early on so you can remedy them quickly and minimize damage to your website, data, and reputation.

Similarly, scheduling regular website backups makes it easier for you to revert to a previous state should your scan find malicious software or files.

This practice is also helpful in case you accidentally delete a crucial file during your cleanup process. This way, you can always restore a functioning version of your website.

Prioritize Continuous Improvement

Hackers and phishers constantly adapt, so your security protocol and solutions should do the same. At Wordfence, we aim to secure the web, which means we’re committed to staying at the forefront of cybersecurity.

Our malware signatures are designed to detect not only active infections but also artifacts generated by malware and other indicators of compromise.

Beyond that, our team of specialists constantly monitor new malware variants, and we release dozens of new signatures every month to keep up with attackers.

Since our signatures use carefully crafted regular expressions, each signature can detect thousands and often even millions of unique malicious files.

The Wordfence CLI scanner was also developed in the spirit of continuous improvement to unlock additional detection possibilities for our plugin scanner.

Final Thoughts: Check Your Website for Malware

As malware continues to be a growing threat, understanding how to check your website for malware and knowing what to do in case of an attack is essential.

While no single solution offers perfect protection, Wordfence offers prevention, detection, and remediation packages that will significantly improve your security posture while remaining compatible with other solutions.

Wordfence CLI serves as a second line of defense, making it possible to scan hundreds or even thousands of sites with a single, competitively priced license, all while conserving server resources.