Part of what makes us have such disgust at so much of what goes on in the security industry is that we see the damage that so many of the people and companies in it cause, over and over. Just yesterday we were discussing the mess caused on one website by Sucuri’s poor attempts to secure and clean the website. That isn’t an isolated incident with them and it isn’t justified in anyway, instead that is the type of company that shouldn’t even be in business since they either are simply unable to do the work they claim to be able to do or intentionally don’t things right. That not only harms their own customer, but they make everyone less secure by spreading false information and doing things that make all website less secure (like not determining how websites are hacked, so that unfixed issues can be resolved). They are not alone in this.
Just a couple of days ago we got yet another example of that type of issue with a company named SiteLock, which also isn’t an isolated incident when it comes to this particular company. In this case they were hired to clean up a hacked website. After the clean up, there were errors and the owner of the website was unable to edit the website (possibly because of the web application firewall that was put in place on the website, which isn’t an isolated issue with WAFs). When SiteLock was contacted about those errors they said that there now was more malware on the website and an additional fee was going to be needed over the $500 just paid, to deal with that.
If you just cleaned a website and there is immediately malware on it again, that means you didn’t get things properly cleaned up the first time, so charging more money to deal with that seems highly inappropriate to us. It certainly isn’t something we would do.
An easy way to avoid ending up in situation like this is to avoid hiring SiteLock. We can’t emphasize enough how many problems we have seen caused by this company that we have dealt with over the years that should have never happened if they had an interest in doing things right.
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