When it comes to the selling of web security services, it is common for those to be sold using with clear falsehoods. We recently highlighted an example of that with a service called Malcare. But the breadth of the falsehoods that were used recently to get $300 out of a customer of the web host HostGator for a SiteLock service stands out.
The customer contacted HostGator support about dealing with the website not showing up as being secure despite a SSL certificate being purchased. They weren’t sure if they were then dealing with someone from SiteLock or HostGator, which sounds a bit odd, since you wouldn’t think that you would contact your web host and be transferred to another company, but that has at least in the past been the case of web hosts, like HostGator, who are partnered with SiteLock. The conversation they then had was described to us and it sounds in line with what have heard in the past and seen when provided transcripts of the conversions.
They were told that the website contained malware, when they responded that was the old website at different web host (they replacing everything because of the website being hacked), they were told that the malware was tied to the domain name and redeployed to the new website to find vulnerabilities. They were told that a firewall needed to be put on the website, for $300, to stop the website from being infected the way the old one was and that the Google search results would be cleaned. As to evidence of the claim of malware, they were pointed the search results for the website, which showed pharmaceutical spam.
There are a lot of falsehood packed in there, which include:
Google’s search results are not real time, so spam pages showing up there doesn’t necessarily mean there is anything at issue with current state of a website, unless they are from a crawl just done. Spam pages are also different than malware.
Even if there were spam pages, they wouldn’t cause the website to not be listed as secure, since that isn’t impacted by that. Potentially a hack could cause pages to not be secure, if say, they added code to existing pages that accesses a website over HTTP instead of HTTPS.
SiteLock couldn’t clean up Google’s results. If the website is still hacked, then cleaning that up would eventually lead to Google’s results no longer showing the spam pages. If it is clean now, then they would just need to wait for Google to refresh them.
Malware isn’t tied to a domain name. If someone is flagging the website as containing malware, that could be tied to the domain name, but that isn’t tied to it being listed as secure as far as we are aware, as that relates to something else.
If there are vulnerabilities, you would want to fix them, not put a firewall around the website, since among other things, there isn’t evidence that firewalls like SiteLock’s would actually effectively protect against those vulnerabilities and plenty that they wouldn’t. Also, hackers are always trying to exploit vulnerabilities on websites, that has nothing do with a domain name being tied to malware.
So almost nothing they said was true and none of it actually addressed the issue that support was being contacted about in the first place. You might think that conduct like this would have some repercussions, but right now neither journalists nor government regulators have shown an interest in it.
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