Whether your business provides a product or a service, having a website with engaging content is important to building, growing, and maintaining your audience. Any effective content strategy will include using a content management system (CMS). One popular CMS many website owners use is Joomla.

Joomla has a lot of great features - it's intuitive to use and has an accessible, versatile platform. But Joomla also has some challenges associated with it as well. Lack of site maintenance and the use of faulty templates can expose your site to cyber attacks.

Malware attacks like these can severely damage your site's performance and reputation. Even worse, it can compromise your content and make your audience think twice about visiting again.

In this post, we're going to share the story of one of our customers and how their Joomla site fell prey to a malicious attack - and how our ThreatSign platform was able to help remedy the issue.

First off, a warning: there are a plethora of free website protection tools available online. They vary in scope and quality. Many of them are valuable resources that can help protect your digital assets. You can't make a blanket statement saying that all free protection tools are invalid - some of them provide plenty of value. It all depends on what your site needs.

Many of these tools fall short in terms of providing comprehensive protection, however. The challenge is that the majority of these resources are unable to handle infections or developed malware that was customized for a specific website. These resources often lack the tooling, complexity, and sophistication needed to handle tailored problems.

Additionally, free protection tools often come with no online support to handle massive infection and reinfection cases. They're the internet equivalent of a bandage: they might help patch up a short-term problem (though they'll more than likely come up woefully short in this regard), but they won't be able to address longstanding systemic issues.

For true protection, you'll need a customized tool like ThreatSign. One of our customers experienced an attack that necessitated the use of ThreatSign. Here's how we helped.

As bad as a website malware attack is, imagine getting reinfected with malware that already understands your site. Worse yet, the reinfection is a customized attack built specifically to impact your site operations. When that happened to one of our customers, it rocked their Joomla site.

One of our customers was hit with a devastating malware attack on their Joomla CMS. They later suffered from massive reinfection. The malware reinfected all Javascript files once per hour. They had over 2,000 Javascript files in all.

At first, the customer wasn't sure where to turn. They used free security modules available for Joomla. If this were a generalized attack, there's a chance they may have been able to overcome it with these tools. The challenge for them was that the infection was targeting their specific website.

The reinfection aspect of this case is where true problems arose. The malware was tailored to their site. That left the free tool the customer used unable to handle and cure the infection.

If this kind of attack feels especially troublesome to you, you're right. For Joomla, users, however, there is a way to prevent or mitigate these types of attacks: using ThreatSign. Here's how our customer did it to cut down the damage.

If you've ever experienced a malware attack, you know how terrifying and powerless it can feel. Equipping your Joomla site with the right protection tool can help cut down on this fear and uncertainty. That's exactly what ThreatSign does, and in this customer's case, it helped eliminate their problem in short order.

ThreatSign is a platform-agnostic, all-in-one detection and protection system for websites. It can protect your website via a DNS firewall or an Endpoint firewall. The platform will also help you either avoid or fix a malware attack if you provide it with access to your files.

First, ThreatSign's scanning features identified the malware. It then generated a complete report detailing the exact location of the problem and what was happening.

Once ThreatSign identified the problem, our engineers found the infection and then developed a dedicated cure rule to scrub all 2,000-plus Javascript files automatically.

Lastly, we connected the Joomla site to all ThreatSign features. This includes our firewall and automatic malware cleanup. That meant that not only had ThreatSign fixed the issue, but it put security measures in place to ensure it didn't happen again. It was a comprehensive solution: both reactive and preventative at once.

The result of ThreatSign's assistance was that the Joomla-based website is live, reappearing in search results. The customer's site performance is no longer suffering, and they don't have to dedicate time and resources to incident response. ThreatSign is in place to keep the site and its content safe.

You may use Joomla for your CMS needs. You may also use another CMS platform. Regardless of the platform you use, your site and its content are susceptible to data breaches that can negatively impact performance.

As much as you may want to save money by using free website security tools found online, these tools can’t help you when malware returns to reinfect your site. These attacks are directed specifically at your site, built just for you. That requires another layer of protection.

That’s where Quttera’s ThreatSign platform becomes an effective source of prevention and protection. Our scanning and detection capabilities can monitor your site to pinpoint any threats, determine their location, and root them out. Post-attack, we can help support a security infrastructure that keeps future malware attempts out and your site operating effectively with malware removal.

Joomla websites can be protected without hassle using the website security platform - ThreatSign. If you want to keep your Joomla (or other CMS platform) managed site clean and operational, ThreatSign is the platform you need.