Scan your site for malware and unauthorized code injections

30-60 min Impact: medium Effort: medium ✓ Manual completion

Scanning your site for malware and unauthorized code injections directly checks whether your site has actually been compromised, malicious code silently injected into your files or database that may not be visually obvious to a normal visitor or even to you.

A compromised site can look completely normal to visitors while quietly serving malware to a subset of them, running affiliate fraud, or being used to send spam, a direct scan is the only reliable way to confirm your site is genuinely clean.

The full picture

Scanning for malware and unauthorized code injections addresses the genuine, real possibility that your site has been compromised in ways that might not be immediately obvious through normal visual inspection — sophisticated attacks sometimes inject malicious code that operates invisibly to a casual visitor while still causing genuine harm, whether to visitors or to your site's reputation and search standing.

This scanning should be understood as ongoing, periodic practice rather than a single verification — new vulnerabilities get discovered and exploited continuously, meaning a site confirmed clean today provides no permanent guarantee against future compromise, making regular, recurring scanning a genuinely necessary ongoing security practice.

The specific things this scanning looks for typically include unauthorized modifications to your core files, suspicious code additions that weren't part of your legitimate codebase, and various known malware signatures that security scanning tools maintain databases of — this represents a genuinely more thorough check than simple visual inspection could provide, since sophisticated malicious code is often specifically designed to avoid obvious visual detection.

Where genuine compromise is detected, prompt, thorough remediation matters significantly — simply removing the obviously malicious code without understanding how the compromise initially occurred risks the same vulnerability being exploited again, making genuine root-cause investigation, not just surface-level cleanup, an important part of properly addressing any confirmed compromise this scanning identifies.

How to do it

1

Run a reputable malware scanning tool

Several dedicated security scanners check for known malware signatures and suspicious code patterns.
2

Review any flagged files closely

Confirm whether a flag is a genuine compromise or a false positive from legitimate but unusual code.
3

Remove any confirmed malicious code

Clean the actual infection, and investigate how it got in to close that specific entry point too.
4

Re-scan periodically

A single clean scan does not guarantee future safety, this is worth repeating on a real schedule.

Common mistakes

Cleaning the visible malicious code without finding and closing the actual entry point the attacker used often results in a rapid re-infection, address the root cause, not just the symptom.