Manual Website Malware Removal Doesn’t Involve Manually Scanning Every File

In looking over a company’s marketing material about why they were a better alternative to SiteLock (which isn’t really difficult considering the many ways that SiteLock is a terrible company), there was a rather absurd claim made:

SiteLock likes to push their “manual” malware removal. However, with the average WordPress having about 1,900 files, can you imagine trying to manually scan that many files and have any kind of accuracy? I believe it’s a strategy for them to have such high prices.

In reality manual website malware removal doesn’t involve someone manually looking over every file on a website, which would be a waste of time. Instead it means that a human is involved in the process of reviewing the files and deciding what needs to be cleaned. One of the important reasons you don’t want a cleanup done with a fully automated process (as this company is promoting that they do and which SiteLock actually makes a big deal of doing as well), is that malicious code added to the website can provide important information on the source of the hack. Cleaning up the malicious code on a website, but not fixing the source of the hack, leaves the website open to being hacked again. We would guess that most people with hacked websites don’t want to have their website needing to be repeatedly cleaned, so they would want to have someone do a cleanup that actual does the work to determine how the website was hacked and then fixes it, instead of paying less upfront and then needing repeated cleanups.

To a large degree reviewing files on a WordPress website involves comparing the files to a clean copy of the files. In the download for the current version of WordPress, 4.7.3, there are 1473 files, so for a WordPress website with 1900 files, a large majority would be checked by simply doing a file comparison of those core WordPress files.

It also worth mentioning that the a major reason why SiteLock’s prices are so high has to do with them paying their web hosting “partners” large portion of the service’s fee, not how they do cleanups (which involves them cutting corners).


A Better Alternative to SiteLock For Cleaning Up a Hacked Website
If your web host is pushing you to hire SiteLock to clean up a hacked website, we provide a better alternative, where we actually properly clean up the website.

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