Tag: SiteLock

Yesterday we looked at an example of the web security company SiteLock trying to mislead someone on what leads to websites being hacked to get them to purchase a reoccurring service with a long term commitment instead a one-time service. Using their one-time cleanup is also a bad option since it doesn’t include fixing vulnerability that allowed the website to be hacked, while costing more than we charge in many instances for a proper cleanup that actually includes the work to secure the website (you can also get a lower quality cleanup from many companies for much less that SiteLock charges). If you make the mistake of signing up for one of SiteLock’s ongoing services you are in for more problems based on what we have seen mentioned by their customers.

In the past we have had people comment and discussed that these service don’t protect websites from getting hacked and SiteLock explaining the solution is to pay them even more.

At least in some instances people are being charged without receiving any invoice or other notice of the ongoing charges.

Then there is trying to cancel, which we have seen numerous complaints from their customers about.

First off, according to their customer agreement you have to call in to a cancel the service:

All cancellation requests must be submitted by calling our Customer Care Department at (415) 390-2500 and must be made prior to the expiration of the Service term.

In one customer’s complaint they mentioned something that really isn’t that surprising to hear about what happens when you call:

It is not possible to each the billing department except by phone and when you call you are connected with a telemarketer that try’s to upsell you and they become rude when they realize there is not going to be a sale.

The “billing department” is actually a salesroom.

You might be waiting a long time to even get to that as one review on SiteLock’s BBB page reported that:

I tried to cancel my account and it is nearly impossible. Was on hold for over 45 minutes and the person said they did and low and behold….billed the next 2 months.

And here is another complaint with someone taking even more time

I’ve spent two hours, over 4 phone calls attempting to cancel the service by phone. I’m currently on another extended hold waiting for a ‘cancellation agent’.

(While it sounds like making you call is about trying to make it difficult to cancel or try to sell to you again, it turns out that for a web services business they don’t seem to be very web savvy, as one of their web hosting partners list that you need to call SiteLock to have their CDN’s cache of your website manually cleared as well.)

If that isn’t bad enough if you don’t cancel at least thirty days prior to end of the subscription period you are going to being paying for another one according to their customer agreement:

Such cancellation must be made at least thirty (30) days prior to the end of Customer’s current subscription period.

Considering that these are web services that should easily be turned on and off, this sort of lead time doesn’t make sense.

In other instances people have complained about various cancellation fees as well, even though with what the services include that doesn’t seem like it would be a reasonable thing.

One of the oddest claims that we have seen related to the web security company SiteLock was that they “don’t control how the hosts sell their services to customers”, which came from a journalist and seemed to be based on their conversation with a SiteLock employee. It’s odd because in what kind of partnership would one partner not have any control over how their services are being sold, but especially in the case of SiteLock’s partnerships where they are paying the web hosts a lot of money to partner with them (one web hosting company disclosed to investors that they get 55% of the revenue of sales of SiteLock services) and when many of the partnered web hosting brands are run by SiteLock’s owners. The other thing that made this so odd is that from everything we have seen the problematic way their services are sold usually involves sales made by SiteLock themselves. The web hosts just push their customers to SiteLock and then when their customer gets in touch with SiteLock they are put in touch with a commissioned sales person, which is where the problems really start.

We have seen and heard plenty snippets of what that involves in the past, but we recently ran across an example of an email from SiteLock that shows how they try to trick people into overpriced services. Not surprisingly considering that they are willing to tell people things that are not true even when the truth doesn’t seem to be a big deal, much of what they said is far from the truth.

Let’s start from the beginning of the email:

It looks like the issue your website is having is more than just infected files and you’re goign to need a manual clean. I recommend the SecureSite plan. I recommend this plan because you’re going to need several cleans during this process (of being under a targeted attack) but the malware itself isnt the biggest issue. The biggest issue the vulnerability that is allowing a hacker (or bots controlled by a hacker) to inject code or infect your files.

SiteLock makes a big deal of their automatic malware removal and how that sets them apart, but what we often see is they tell people that it won’t handle the issue on their website and they are going to need a manual clean, which comes with an additional cost. In one case they also claimed that a website couldn’t be automatically cleaned “without risking bringing down our site”.

A real problem with automated malware removal is that when cleaning up malware or other malicious code what is found can often provide important information on how the website was hacked, so if the cleanup is fully automated the cleaner is potentially going to miss important information needed to get the website secured. Normally SiteLock doesn’t actually determine how the website is hacked, so that doesn’t matter, but not doing that leaves the website open to the possibility of being hacked again. While doing that is actually a basic part of a cleanup, as will come up later SiteLock will charge even more money to do that (for a lot of cleanups they charge more to just remove the malicious code than we do for a proper cleanup including getting the website secured).

There is always going to be a vulnerability that allowed a hacker in, otherwise how would the hack have even happened.

The claim that website is being targeted isn’t actually true, unless you count every hack as being a targeted one. The explanation of how the website is being targeted doesn’t make sense:

You are being targeted by this hacker, they already know how and where the vulnerability exists and they will not stop sending bots to you until your website is destroyed or until the bots “hit a wall”. Typically about 4-5 months of rejected attempts the hacker will send the bots elsewhere as they’re usually after low hanging fruit. They’re hacking 10s of thousands of sites at a time and usually the goal is stealing traffic or placing malware on your site to get onto peoples computers to steal information. After the vulnerability is fixed, they’ll move on, I wish I could elaborate on what’s causing this right now but I don’t want to just guess, the data in the manual clean will give me exactly the information I need whether it’s having our technicians recode entry fields on the website or if something needs to be done on a server level via your host.

From dealing with many hacked websites we get the sense that this is written by someone who has no idea what actually happens with hacking attempts on websites, which they probably don’t, since it was coming from a sales person not a technical person.

The reality is that most hackings are not targeted at specific websites; instead hackers try to exploit the same vulnerability across many websites, which is often referred to as a mass hack. Either the website is vulnerable and the hacker will take further actions once they successfully exploit the vulnerability or they will move on to other websites. Often times there look to be numerous different people or groups trying to exploit the same vulnerability, so a vulnerable website might get hacked more than once (that is good reason to promptly deal with a hacked website once you become aware it has been hacked).

Hackers are not usually interested in destroying websites. The closet we see with that are defacements hacks where a hacker causes a website’s pages normal content to be replaced with a message from the hacker. The website’s content would normally not be destroyed by that. In other cases hackers are interested in using the website to do something else, say sending spam emails, which wouldn’t destroy it at all. Of course if you are trying to scare people, then telling hackers are trying to destroy their website would make sense.

Another part of shouldn’t really make sense even if you are not familiar with hacked websites. The email claims that “Typically about 4-5 months of rejected attempts the hacker will send the bots elsewhere as they’re usually after low hanging fruit.” Why would a hacker keep trying to exploit a vulnerability for months on end when either the vulnerability is exploitable or isn’t? The answer would seem to be that they are trying to lock you in to a six month commitment to one of their services, again this coming from a salesperson.

After the manual clean we will also your host (if your website is suspended) so that they can re-instate the account if you’ve been deactivated, we will also take care of any blacklisting issues (Google, Norton, AVG, Avast, Bing , Yahoo, etc… if there is a warning screen stating that your website is malicious or that it has malicious content). You do have the option of purchasing a one time clean from us but typically within 24 – 72 hrs, you’ll need another clean due to the bots attacking you. One time cleans are also $300 per clean, per domain and vulnerability fixes are the same price of $300 per domain.

A proper one time cleanup would actually involve determining how the website has gotten hacked and making sure it is fixed. Their pricing is just outrageous. If you want a poor quality cleanup that doesn’t involve doing things properly, you can spend a lot less than $300. For many websites we charge less than $300 to do things properly, meanwhile SiteLock wants $600 to do that. The idea that they would even sell a service that they know leaves a website vulnerable is rather troubling.

I would also be happy to review the services with you after 6 months to make sure that bot traffic has decreased, I encourage you to reach out to me so we can determine whether you’re still being targeted. I can proudly say that 100% of my customers that follow my recommendations (after the clean, as far as general maintenance) not only are malware free and no longer the victim of a targeted attack but also likely will not have a need for unlimited cleans and can explore other options (we have nearly 70 different products and services).

Here we get to them trying to get you to a six month commitment, the price of this wasn’t mentioned, but we have recently had people mention that they are trying get them to sign up for services that are $100 a month (in some instances it is even higher than that). That would be the same price as their overpriced cleanup and securing service, but with the added difficulty of trying to cancel the service at six months. The fact that they offer a service with unlimited cleanups is a good indication that they don’t properly secure websites, since if you do a proper cleanup the website shouldn’t be able to be exploited through the same issue again at all.

Considering that very few websites are ever targeted by hackers, the person receiving this email likely was never targeted in the first place.

When it comes to people being taken advantage of by the web security company SiteLock, their web hosting partners seem to play a critical role, as it looks like a lot of their business comes through them instead of people going directly to SiteLock. What seemed to us to be the likely explanation of why the web hosts would partner with SiteLock despite them being quite bad at being a security company and their sales practices, was the web hosts getting paid to push their services.

What was surprising to us when we ran across it is how much money they are getting, one of SiteLock’s web hosting partners, the Endurance International Group, disclosed to investors that they get 55% of the revenue from the SiteLock partnership (it also turns out that the web hosting company is also run by one SiteLock’s majority owners). So people that get pushed to their service end up paying at least twice as much as the service they are really getting costs.

That obviously raises some serious questions about the arrangement, but what seems of more concern is that from what we have seen their web hosting partners don’t disclose the financial arrangement. (What they will sometimes say instead is that SiteLock is a trusted partner, which doesn’t point to the web host being someone you can trust.)

When a web host tells their customer that should hire a certain company to clean up your website, we don’t think it is unreasonable that they should be told the truth about why that recommendation is being made.

With one of the web hosts owned by the Endurance International Group, HostGator, we found that the wouldn’t even acknowledge that they are getting any money out of the partnership when it was pointed out their parent company has already disclosed this fact to investors.

While the web hosts are not upfront about this, when SiteLock is promoting the partnerships program to web host they are. Here is the list of the “Top Three Reasons to Partner with SiteLock” from the page about their program:

The first two items listed are revenue related:

Generated $20
Million in Partner
Revenue

and

Dedicated SecurePartner
Support on Sales and
Marketing Efforts

So that gives a pretty good idea of what these partnerships are really about, if it wasn’t clear already.

What the third one is supposed to refer isn’t entirely clear, SiteLock does refer to itself as the Global Leader in Website Security (which is far from the truth):

Partner with the
Global Leaders Across
the Industry

We think that web hosts getting involved in this is a good sign that you should avoid them (you can check out our list of web hosts who partnered with SiteLock if you want to to that).

If you are unfortunately at the point where your web host is pushing you to SiteLock, you should take a look at our post on what you should know in that situation before doing anything else.

Over two years ago we noted that SiteLock wasn’t doing a basic part of a proper hack cleanup, properly securing the website, which usually mainly involves making all of the software of the website is brought up to date. That situation hasn’t changed, as just about three months ago we were brought in to fix a website after SiteLock cleanup had broken it. In that case not only had the software not been updated, but SiteLock had also failed to attempt to determine how the website was hacked. If they had done that they would have spotted part of the cause of the hack was one of their web hosting partners, GoDaddy, allowed remote access databases that were set not to allow it. When you consider that SiteLock often charges $300 for a cleanup, which is more than we charge for many cleanups where we do those things, their customers are really getting ripped off.

It turns out that SiteLock doesn’t recommend using their one time hack cleanup service, not because they are not doing things properly, but so they can charge customers even more money and keep charging for something that should have a one time cost.

In a complaint with BBB (https://www.bbb.org/phoenix/business-reviews/internet-services/sitelock-llc-in-scottsdale-az-1000018625/reviews-and-complaints) one of their customers describe the situation:

After my business website was hacked on or before December 29, 2015, I was advised by my web hosting company to contact its security partner, Sitelock. Sitelock offered me two options: a one-time cleaning for $300, or cleaning plus monitoring for $90/month.

I was again told I chose the wrong product (he said they don’t recommend the $300 cleaning to anyone).

So instead of paying $300 for a low quality cleanup they wanted them to pay $1080 a year for monitoring and continuous cleanups. There are multiple issues with that. Some of those revolve around the reason they recommended against the one time cleanup:

I was then told I chose the wrong product (the $300 cleaning) because I had an active hacker who went right back to work on my site.

A proper one-time cleanup should prevent the active hacker from getting “right back to work on my site”. But if you don’t determine how the website was hacked and fix that (as websites don’t just get hacked, something had to have gone wrong for that to occur), as well as making sure the website is otherwise secured, then it isn’t surprising that a hacker could get back in.

Since SiteLock’s continuing service doesn’t do those things either, the best they can do is to keep detecting the hacker has accessed the website and clean things up after the fact. Having a hacker repeatedly get access to your website is not something that should be happening, even if it could be quickly cleaned up each time. What if a hacker gets access to customer data, once that has been taken a SiteLock clean up won’t undo that. There is also the issue that SiteLock doesn’t exactly have the best track record of detecting hacks, so they might not even spot was is going on to clean it up.

If you are spending $1080 a year on security it would be spent doing things that would actual prevent the website from being hacked, SiteLock doesn’t provide a service that does those things (probably because it would require actually doing a lot of work).

Based on all that you might not be surprised to hear that the one time cleanup done on that website had another problem. The website was messed up, which SiteLock excused based on this:

The hack affected many of the core platform and theme files (985 files total – attached).  The site’s appearance after the… clean had been completed was due to the compromised core and theme files.

A proper hack cleanup would have properly fixed the compromised files so you wouldn’t be left a website with appearance issues (that was also one of the issues with the website hosted with GoDaddy earlier and earlier instance with a GoDaddy hosted website).

At this point you might be wondering why this person’s web host had a security partnership SiteLock considering how bad they are. The reason at some web hosts is in part that SiteLock’s owners also run the web hosts (something that web hosts don’t acknowledge publicly) and the other big reason is that the web hosts get a significant amount of money pushing SiteLock services. In the case of one of them, the web hosts disclosed that they get 55% of the revenue from SiteLock services sold through the partnership. Which in the case of that ongoing service, would work out to $594 a year, without requiring them to do any work. The one time cleanup would get them $165. If you do have a hacked website and are getting pushed to SiteLock, beyond obviously avoiding them, you should take a look at a previous post we wrote that goes into more detail as to what you should know in that situation.

As we have looked closer at how the web security company SiteLock takes advantage of people we have found that their web hosting partners are critical component of that being possible. Avoiding those web hosts prevents you from getting taken advantage of and also if enough people did that would get web hosts to stop allowing that to happen in the first place, but we also think that by partnering with SiteLock these web hosts are showing they are companies you should avoid even if you are not worried about being taken advantage of by SiteLock. There are number of reasons we think that is the case:

First, these web hosts are not being upfront with their customers as they don’t disclose that their partnership is really based around them getting a significant cut of SiteLock fees. That means for example, that they are making a large profit of off their customers websites being hacked. In the case some of their partners the web hosts are even controlled by the owners of SiteLock, something the web hosts won’t even publicly acknowledge, despite it being disclosed to their investors. If they are not being upfront about that, you have to wonder what else they are not being truthful about.

Second, they are showing that money they get from SiteLock is more important than their customers, as SiteLock is not a company that should be anywhere near the security of websites based on what we have seen over the years. This is due to the fact that at a basic level they don’t even try to properly clean up website, leaving them open to exploited again, and in some cases they couple that with leaving a broken website behind as well. They are also rather bad at detecting malicious code and detecting whether websites are secure. There are many companies that clean up hacked website, so to partner with SiteLock, it has to been about getting that money, not about doing what is best for their customers.

Third, we have found that these web hosts who are partnered with them do not have much concern for security. Not only by getting involved with a really bad security company, but their own practices. For example, at one web host we found that they were distributing outdated, inscure, software to their customers and their access controls were broken, leading to websites being hacked that otherwise would not have been. We don’t find that type of thing surprising, seeing as we can’t imagine a company that really cared about security partnering with SiteLock, considering their track record. Making their customers more secure would also likely reduce the amount of money they can make through selling SiteLock services as well.

To help you to avoid those web host we have started to compile a list of web host who have partnered with SiteLock. If you know of addition or subtraction we need to make to the list please leave a comment below or contact us.

(Last update: April 20, 2017)

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