Malware Detection

Malware is a major cybersecurity threat, which can affect your web sites (and your business) too. Acunetix can help you detect malware on your websites and in your web applications by integrating with renowned malware detection services and software. This is very important because undetected malware affects the performance of your web server, causes your users to see malware flags in their browsers, and decreases the confidence and the SEO rating of your site. There are two ways in which Acunetix protects your web assets from malware: malicious link detection and malicious file detection.

Acunetix uses safe browsing services from Google and Yandex as the basis for detecting suspicious links. If your website or web application links to a site that is known to be malicious, the link will get flagged by Acunetix during a scan. If a malicious link is found in your web assets, it could mean that either your website was attacked or the website that the link is pointing to was attacked. Most of the time, malicious links appear on your site because of ineffective user input filtering. For example, if your web assets include a non-moderated comment section, malicious links could be inserted there by visitors.

During a crawl, Acunetix identifies not only links but also malicious scripts that are present on your website or accessed via your web application. Acunetix downloads such files and scans them for malware. Malware is detected using renowned virus scanning engines. In the case of Microsoft Windows, Acunetix uses the built-in Microsoft Defender. On Linux, Acunetix integrates with free ClamAV antivirus software.