Malware is a short form of "Malicious Software" that is created by the hackers to allow them to gain access to a computer system once it was infected. There are many reasons why the hackers wanted to do so, but most of them with no good intentions. Today we are going to talk through how it will affect your website operations.

Once your computer is infected, the hackers who created the Malware may gain access to your computer to retrieve sensitive information, disrupting your computer operations, controlling your computer devices such as camera or keyboard and many other possibilities.

 

 

Yes, both personal computers or even web servers are vulnerable to the attack. It depends on their intention of creating the Malware. There are many Malware out there infecting thousands of websites everyday.

 

There is a very common intention of the Malware attacking websites, diverting all their traffics to launch a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack on a targetted victim website, all at the same time. Imagine that you send million of cars driving towards Genting Highlands at the same time, other drivers will never get to their destination because of the terrible traffic jam. In that case, Genting Highlands was the victim of the DDoS attack.

 

 

Some hackers are being paid to do so by a competitor of a website or business. A very prominent case happened in Malaysia was the DDoS attack on the MalaysiaKini website. The attack is to stop them from publishing any news that will damage the image of opponent  parties or individuals.

 

However, attacking the giant sites like Google, Facebook or Twitter is very impossible as the hackers will never have the resources enough to jam their multi-million dollars facilities.

 

 

Some of the Malware are pointing their target straight towards the loopholes of your outdated website scripts. Script developers often offer updates to strengthen their products from being vulnerable to the attacks, and that is why frequent updates on your sites are crucial.

 

Backup your website frequently so that you would have an uninfected copy with you. Restoring it is much easier and cost saving compared to rebuilding the entire system and its content.

 

There are of course a lot of anti-Malware products out there to help protecting your personal computers or websites. It tightens the data security passing in and out of your system and performing frequent scanning on suspicious Malware. Anyway, there is no one anti-Malware software that gives you a 100% guarantee of the protection and it is always good to take pre-cautious actions before the attacks have taken place. Good luck!