Google - Malware Warning - Advice

[Mick_Clark]

Hello

Google has now listed my site as suspicious and as a site that can harm a visitors computer and has given me the following explanation:

What happened when Google visited this site?

Of the 107 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 6 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2010-07-04, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2010-07-04.

Malicious software includes 7 exploit(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 2 new process(es) on the target machine.

Malicious software is hosted on 1 domain(s)

This site was hosted on 2 network(s) including AS21219 (DATAGROUP), AS25653 (FORTRESSITX).

Please can anyone give me any ideas on how this could have
happened and advice on preventing similar occurences in the future.

Many thanks in advance for any replies you are able to give.

Mick

[edited by: tedster at 4:23 pm (utc) on Jul 5, 2010]

[tedster]

Hello Mick_Clark, and welcome to the forums.

The short answer is that your site was hacked. There is an epidemic of hacking right now, and once the hackers have access they either infect your site with malware or they add "parasite" hosting for their own links. With malware injection, a very common hack is to to hide an iframe at the bottom of your source code.

These hacks often happen because some server software is not up to date and using the most recent version or patch and th hacker has found a security hole in the old version.

The way to fix it has several parts. First, update the server software and remove all the injected code. Then you can ask for a "Malware Review" and if the site is clean, the warning will be removed.

There's a lot of detail on the whole process in the article Malware Reviews [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com], from Google's Webmaster blog.

[Mick_Clark]

Thank you very much for you speedy reply, it is really helpful. I'll try everything you have suggested.
Kind regards
Mick