Does Issue on Performance Indicates the Presence of Malware?

Blog 14 Sep 2021

Traffic of visiting users is very important for an e-commerce site. Since decreasing traffic means reducing amount of conversions too. One of many causes of decreasing performance is malware. This article explores the likelihood of hacking activity (including malware) as source of decreasing traffic.

Performance issues related to troublesome of site's ability to adhere to the targeted load time or to serve a massive amount of users in the peak time.

Performance issues can be traced to many sources. One of them is a malware. Although not all performance issues can be determined as a result of hacking activities. This "inspecting whether our website is being hacked or not" article from SentryPage remind us how to recognize hacking activity and prevent the incident.

The presence of malware is one of the causes of performance issues because this is software that has been designed to steal data, harm the software that being running, and do other nasty things. To acknowledge decreased performance caused by malware, we shall ask three (3) following questions:

How to distinguish performance issues caused by malware?
Can we be notified if there is malware installed on our website?
Can we monitor performance and malware things at the same time?

Usage combination of SentryPage and Google Search Console (GSC) together help us in keeping the performance as targeted. With SentryPage acts in monitoring defacement – to recognise the hacked page. While GSC plays a role in general prevention.

GSC does not act as an antivirus, but it's more like giving a warning (in Search Console notification) when Google detects malware on your site. Do not worry about additional costs, GSC is a free service offered by Google.

GSC also provide the Security Issues report that will let you know about any hacking or malware. From Google's findings, you can know behaviour that could potentially harm visitors or your computer, including phishing attacks or installing malware on computer.

Conclusion

Being free from malware is a very expensive price for e-commerce (and other websites) owners. Wherever it is hosted, no website is 100% secured enough. The site can still be attacked, and having a performance issue. Malware can be a suspect of performance issues, but we must monitor other possible causes as well, such as hacking activity. Embedding SentryPage to our monitoring tools helps us finding hacked page earlier.