Are you looking for a way to fix your hacked website? If you are, Sucuri ($199/year) is a great all-in-one option. But if it’s too expensive, below you’ll find a couple of the best Sucuri alternatives of 2019.
Best Sucuri Alternatives: Hacked Websites
A month ago, I received a panicked call from a friend. “My website’s been hacked,” they told me. “Can you fix it ASAP? I need that site up for my business, I’m losing customers”.
Cue me dropping everything and looking into what the problem was. Yes, they had been hacked, and their website was down, but it wasn’t anything serious. I had the site back online within an hour. And if you follow the steps below, your hacked website can be back online (malware-free) within an hour too.
My friend had their site hosted with SiteGround. Nothing wrong here. SiteGround is an excellent hosting provider with fast speeds and excellent uptime stats.
However, once SiteGround detects that a site has Malware, it immediately suspends that site. This is exactly what had happened to my friend’s site.
The good news is that as soon as the site’s malware was cleaned, the site was online again just as quickly.
Best Sucuri Alternatives: How websites get infected
My friend’s website was a WordPress website. And if you’re reading this article because you’re website has been hacked too and you want to find out what to do, then there’s a strong chance you have a WordPress site too. In fact, 34% of all websites run WordPress.
This is a massively high percentage. The next highest is Joomla with a tiny 2.9 per cent. Squarespace and Wix are insignificant in comparison with just 1.5 and 1.1 per cent shares respectively.
WordPress’ dominance makes them a logical target for hackers. Much like Windows has more malware than Macs, because the userbase is much bigger. It’s all a numbers game.
Anyway, hackers target WordPress. And they do so by in a couple of ways.
How WordPress sites get hacked
Brute force
The easiest way the baddies infect WordPress sites is by brute force attacks. This is when an attacker tries to enter multiple usernames and passwords to gain access to your hosting provider or /wp-admin/ site. And if you have easy-to-guess login details like “admin” and “password”, then your WordPress site is probably already hacked.
Plugins and Themes
A more sophisticated hacker will upload malicious files to your WordPress site through third-party Plugins and Themes. The annoying thing here is that a Plugin or Theme might be safe when you install it to your site. But when an update is released, it might contain malware. Worse still, if an attacker successfully hacks the owner of the Plugin or Theme, they can then upload malicious files to all of the WordPress sites running their software via a simple update in a similar way to how CCleaner was hacked in 2017.
Other hacks
The two methods above are the most common (according to data provided by WordFence). But there are loads of other ways. Hackers can literally buy the login details of previously hacked websites from the Dark Web. Remember the relatively recent (and high profile) Ashley Maddison and British Airways hack? These are exactly the sorts of security breaches where the user data ends up on the dark web. And if you, as nearly all people do, use the same email/username and password for all your sites – it provides a cost-effective way for hackers to get access to your WordPress website.
There are also more straightforward methods attackers can use as Phishing and gaining access to your local-computer or FTP site first.
The bottom line is that there are tons of ways the bad guys can hack WordPress sites. So my advice to you, and my friend above was to invest in some protection.
Best Sucuri Alternatives
Sucuri is a great all-in-one tool for protecting your WordPress. At $199/year for the basic plan it provides excellent, and fast protection, from hacked websites. It’s also really simple to use. However, it’s not the cheapest on the market. And if you’ve got several URLs you need to protect, the price can soon become unaffordable.
Below are some alternatives you can use.
1. VirusDie
Like Sucuri, this is another cloud-based service that requires you uploading a PHP file to your hosting providers’ File Manager. Don’t be intimidated by this, as it’s really easy to do. And VirusDie offers excellent tutorials and customer service to help you along the way.
Once you’ve uploaded the VirusDie PHP file to your web host you can control everything re your site’s security from the VirusDie website. This keeps things nice and simple. From here you can scan and remove any malicious files.
VirusDie also offers an excellent Firewall and gives you the option to set up regular security scans of your website.
2. Astra
Astra is also a powerful website security tool. But the version you need, for on-demand malware scans, starts at $24/month – making it a little more expensive than VirusDie above. And Sucuri.
What you’re getting is a premium one-size-fits-all service that you can quickly set up and then let it do its thing.
The user interface here is beautiful and easy to use. If you want to remove malware from your site asap, Astra is a great option.
Read next: Best Mac Antivirus 2019
