6 Free Cybersecurity Tools

VirusTotal was founded in 2004 as a free service that analyzes files and URLs for viruses, worms, trojans and other kinds of malicious content. Since then, it has become a widely used ecosystem where everyone contributes and everyone benefits, working together to improve internet security.

VirusTotal is easy to use and helps you analyze suspicious files and URLs to detect types of malware. It also automatically shares the results with the security community to help protect everyone. This tool checks with over 80 security vendors to see if any of them have flagged a URL, file, domain, etc. as malicious. By aggregating security data from so many sources, this tool provides an excellent analysis for your security issue. Try a test at https://www.virustotal.com/gui/home/url.

Sucuri is one of the top rated website security companies for WordPress websites. This scan also works on old HTML sites, PHP sites, Joomla and others. Just enter a website address (URL), like example.com, and the Sucuri SiteCheck scanner will check the websites for

You should avoid visiting sites that are known to have malware, viruses, malicious code, etc. Additionally, you check your own website to see if it is safe and secure.

You can also install Securi website security on your own website.

They are especially well known for having one of the best malware removal services and for their Web Application Firewall (WAF).

Additionally, Sucuri protects your website from hackers, malware, DDoS attacks, suspicious redirects, rogue iframes, link injections and even alerts you if your site is blacklisted. In addition to providing WordPress website security, they help secure websites running on Joomla, Drupal, PHP, .NET and older sites using HTML.

Sucuri's Unmask Parasites tool identifies hidden, illicit content that may have been maliciously inserted into your website, without your knowledge or consent, through security vulnerabilities in your website. Just like in nature when a parasite attaches itself to a host (think about ticks), the parasite benefits from a prolonged, involuntary and undetected close association, which is harmful to the host. It's the same thing on your website if you get a parasitic hack.

One parasitic method hackers use is to maliciously insert hundreds of hidden links into web sites in order to advertise medications (often ED meds and supplements), cheap loans and porn, etc. About fifteen percent of all web pages tested with this tool have shown parasitic infections.

Another example of hidden malicious content is a method where hackers steal your search engine click-through visitors from Google results where rank high,  and they redirect those people intending to visit your website to completely different web sites owned by spammers. So people who want to see your website never get to it.

Parasitic redirects are hard to detect because...

1. How often do you lookup your own company on Google?
2. And when you hopefully see yourself ranking well in the search results, how often do you actually click on your website's link in those search results to test it?
3. how often do you carefully read every page of your website so you might notice some illicit inserted links?

If you're like most small companies, then not very often, if ever. And this is why random, malicious insertion of nefarious links on your own website are extremely hard to notice. And this is why your company needs a comprehensive WordPress website security plan.

So parasitic hacking is a serious problem. It steals your traffic. It will, over time, cause you to lose ranking in the Google search results. It might even result in Google banning your website from the search results because your website just looks like a scam to the search engine algorithms. Plus, it can seriously damage your reputation among your customers and potential customers.

At Baer Web Design, we spend a lot of time tracking, evaluating and improving search results for our clients. Part of that process is clicking on our clients' competitor websites in the search results to analyze what is helping them rank as well as to see what cool things they might be doing on their websites. We have seen more and more parasitic "pharma hacking" among those competitor websites in the past few years because it works for the hackers.

Among B2B small business websites, parasitic hacking often goes undetected for months and months. Meanwhile you're unknowingly suffering damage in many ways. Among our clients, however, it has not happened so far because we implement extensive WordPress website security measures.

So for your website, you can either constantly search for your own website on Google and test the links, and carefully read every page of your website frequently to look for hacked links, or you can just run Sucuri's Unmask Parasites tool monthly. That's the quick, easy and free solution to avoid what can otherwise be a devastating hack against your company.

Learn more / FAQs: https://unmask.sucuri.net/service-faq/general/#1

The Google Transparency Report's Safe Browsing technology analyzes billions of web pages daily looking for unsafe websites. But you can also use this tool to see whether a specific website is dangerous to visit. Just copy the web address URL and paste it into the "Search by URL" field.

Thousands of new unsafe sites are found daily with Google's Safe Browsing technology. Many of these websites are legitimate websites that have been hacked. When Google detects unsafe sites, warnings are shown on Google search results and in web browsers. These warnings are designed to prevent users from visiting harmful sites and help them stay safe online.

So use this tool, for example, to check out the safety of a web page that was linked to in your email. Or when you're reading content on a site that suspect is kind of sketchy, use this tool to check out any links on that page before you click them! And check out the sketchy web page as well, by copying and pasting it's URL address into the Safe Browsing tool. It's quite simple... be suspicious of links and use the Google Safe Browsingtool to check them out.

File-based attacks are the most common method of cyber-security breaches in organizations. Is your company protected against one of your employees carelessly opening a malicious PDF file, Word doc or other email attachment? Is the person who sent the email legitimate? How do you even know which attachments are safe and which are not? Maybe it's important, so you just open open it! STOP! Check it on MetaDefender Cloud! As MetaDefender says, “Trust no file”!

This service is an easy and free cloud based security scanning tool that allows even small companies to increase their cybersecurity. Just upload and scan a file for viruses and then 30+ anti-malware engines will render a safety judgment in less than 10 seconds!

You can also copy and paste a URL link to a file, a web page, a domain or an IP address, but in our tests, this scanning method shows results for significantly fewer anti-malware engines vs. uploading an actual file.

So when you're not 100% sure, just scan it and protect your company against data breaches, ransom attacks and much more!