The Website Security Platform provides several different scanning types that will notify you by email if it detects malware, code anomalies, or other signs of infection.
From the monitoring dashboard, you can enable each monitoring type and the rate at which the scans will run in the Settings page. Refer to this article for a visual reference.
Learn more about each scanning type below.
Security Check
Our remote Security check identifies: obfuscated javascript injections, cross site scripting, website defacements, hidden & malicious iframes, PHP mailers, phishing attempts, malicious redirects, backdoors, anomalies, drive-by-downloads, social engineering attacks, SEO blackhat spam, pharma hacks, conditional redirects and mobile redirects.
This scan will check for and alert to signs of the following:
- Defacement– alterations of the site’s visual appearance and content
- Spam– content that promotes unrelated products or services
- Vulnerabilities– insecure or vulnerable code that could lead to a hack
- Web Trust– ensures you’ll know when your site is blocklisted by: PhishTank, Opera browser, SiteAdvisor, Sucuri Malware Labs, Yandex (via Sophos), and ESET
More blocklist information - Outdated Software– your site’s software version will be checked against the most current safe version
- Issues– redirects or errors related to specific pages on the site
Frequency: once every 1, 12, or 24 hours.
Server Side Scanner
The Server Side Scanner inspects your website’s core files directly on the server. It identifies obfuscated code, backdoors, phishing pages, and file integrity issues that remote scanners can’t access. It’s essential for deeper visibility and stronger protection.
If you’re already a client and haven’t set up Server Side Scanning, you can learn how to enable the scan in this article: Server Side Scan Configuration
Frequency: once every 24 hours. This is the only scanner frequency that cannot be configured.
Uptime
Uptime monitoring is a service that checks if a website is online and will send you an alert if your website is down. After additional checks, an alert will be sent again when the website is back up.
Two randomly assigned monitors from our fleet will send HTTP requests to your site at the specified uptime scan frequency. If the monitors don’t receive an identical response from your hosting server, the results are discarded. The scanners will follow a maximum of 5 redirects. A website is considered to be down if the host server returns an error or it times out.
You can learn more about the Uptime monitor alerts in this article.
Frequency: once every 5, 10, 20, 30, or 60 minutes.
SSL Monitoring
An SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a certificate on the website that allows encryption of information from the client to the server. If your site uses an SSL certificate, it is important to know the status of the certificate in order to keep your customer’s Personally Identifiable Information (PII) safe.
It’s rare that your SSL certificate will change, but if it does, you will be alerted to any changes via email.
Frequency: once every 1, 12, or 24 hours.
DNS Monitoring
DNS is a protocol used by computers to communicate. It turns a website’s name (somesite.com, for example) into an Internet Protocol (IP) address like 123.123.123.123. The name provided by DNS is what we use as humans to read the website name. The IP is what the computers use to locate the website.
This option will monitor your website’s DNS A, Nameserver, and MX records. It’s rare for this information to change, but if it does, you will be notified.
Frequency: once every 1, 12, or 24 hours.
Free Remote Scanning
Anyone can have their sites scanned remotely with our free scanner:
sitecheck.sucuri.net
If you need any assistance configuring the various scanning types, please feel free to open a support ticket with the Sucuri team.