How to Remove Virus from your Joomla Website?

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When you are operating a Joomla website, you want to have people visit the website. If no one visits the website, what is the point of it? Creating and running a website that is successful is not easy. You have to create a website that others want to use and you have to make sure the website is functional. It does not matter if you are trying to create a website for fun or if you are trying to turn it into a revenue generating website; you need to make sure that it is always working properly.

Anyone that is familiar with computers understands the problems that viruses and hackers can cause. A virus that infects a computer can be used to steal an individual’s private information or it can render the computer it is on unusable. If a virus infects a Joomla website, the damage can be very severe. It cannot only affect the individual that is running the website; it can also cause problems for any visitors to an infected website. If the virus on the website is not dealt with, the website will not be successful and it could end up costing a lot of time and money for anyone that is involved with the site.

Taking responsibility

It is up to the owner of the Joomla website to make sure that they do not have problems with hackers or viruses. The visitors to a website expect that any private information they provide to a website is kept secure. They expect to be able to navigate to a website safely without putting their computer at risk. If a website cannot provide this, people will not visit the website.

A Joomla website owner needs to make sure they have safeguards in place that block hackers and viruses from ever getting onto their website. Security software such as Immunet is essential to this process. If the owner of the site can prevent these things from happening, they do not have to worry about potential damage or any other problems.

Getting rid of viruses

Before you do anything else, when you’ve discovered you have a virus, you need to step back and take a deep breath. It is not the end of the world. There are steps that can be taken to remove the virus.

Run a virus scan – This is the first basic step to do. There are free virus scans available like Immunet or there are paid for versions that can be used. This step will help identify whether a website has a virus and what the virus is.
Contact the hosting provider – Provide the hosting provider with as much information as possible. If you have backed up your site and are aware of when your website got infected, you can do a site restore to a time before the virus was on the website and you can move on. If you do not know when the virus infected your website, you may have to make an educated guess, or you can contact professional services that may help remove the virus.

A site restore can be an effective way to remove a virus on a Joomla website, but it is not perfect. Any changes to a website that have occurred since the time that the site was last backed up will be lost. It also requires a website owner to back up their website on a regular basis. These are the considerations that must be thought about when using this method to remove a virus.

Another way to remove the virus

If a person wants to try to remove the virus on their own without a site restore, they can try another process.

Open the task manager and go to the processes tab
Find the file titled wscipt.exe and end that process
Open the windows registry editor
Find the VirusMar file and hit the delete key
Close the windows registry editor and open the control panel
Click on show hidden and protected files
Open My computer and find the windows directory
Find the VirusMar.js file and hit the delete key
Navigate to the VirusMar.js file and delete the file

For many people who have used Joomla to create a website, the process of removing the virus may be too difficult. That is why it is often worth turning to experts that know how to remove these viruses. The one thing that should never be done is to ignore the virus. It is much better to take care of it as soon as possible.

This article is written by James Edwards. By profession he is a technical support specialist from NYC and has been associated with the IT for the last 5 years. He also likes to write articles on computer security & teach people on cloud based antivirus software so they keep their computers protected from viruses & malware. View author's profile.