If you've been the unfortunate victim of a hacker, you may find that when visting your site, your browser displays one of the following types of warnings:

• Google: Malware Detected! Warning: Visiting this site may harm your computer!
• Firefox: Reported Attack Site!

These tools have recently been introduced by Google, Firefox, and Stopbadware.org in order to help the spread of malicious software through infected sites, or sites that facilitate connections to malicious sites... more frequently occuring without any knowledge of the site's owner as a result of a hacker modifying content on the website. 

To get your site removed from these warning lists, you need to follow a three step process in general:

1. Remove the malicious code from your site
   • While you might be able to find and remove all the malicious code from your site, if you maintain a local copy of your site on your PC, you may find it's quicker and more thorough to remove all files from your hosting space, and republish your entire site from your clean, local backup copy of the site.  This doesn't work for all scenarios, but where available, can save you lots of time hunting through lines and lines of code looking for that one line of obfuscated javascript a hacker inserted into one or more of your files.
2. Protect your site against future attacks
   • Determining how your site was modified may be the most difficult task.  Currently, the most common trends are having obtained your site's FTP credentials.  Don't think it's that likely?  Have you read the following article which discuss a hacker's database that contained 70,000 FTP credentials including those for McAfee, Cisco and Symantec? 
   • http://knowledge.3essentials.com/web-hosting/article/953/Security-Bulletin-FTP-login-credentials-at-major-corporations-breached.html
   • ...Or the following article that discusses potentially 100,000 cable/DSL and home/office routers infected with a worm which listens to all traffic in/out of your network to capture credentials?
   • http://knowledge.3essentials.com/web-hosting/article/977/Security-Bulletin-Is-your-Cable-DSL-modem-or-router-infected.html
   • ...FTP is still widely the most used mechanism for transferring files (including here at 3Essentials), but it is insecure as it transmits user credentials without encryption.  The following articles discusses options 3Essentials has or is in the process of making available to give you more secure options for transferring files:
   • http://knowledge.3essentials.com/web-hosting/article/446/Secure-FTP-SFTP-or-FTPS.html
3. Request a review of your site by Google for them to remove the warning.

The best resource we've found to help you through this is at StopBadware.org:

• http://stopbadware.org/home/reviewinfo
• http://stopbadware.org/home/security