Configuring Acunetix to enable Malware Scan

Acunetix can work in conjunction with AntiVirus engines to check for malware on your site. The default engine used is the Windows Defender AntiVirus service where it is available (such as Windows 8 and Windows 10). As an alternative, Acunetix can also interface with ClamAV, a popular open source antivirus product.

Installing Malware Scanning on your Operating System

The first step is to install Malware Scanning on your Acunetix Machine.

Installing Malware Scanning on Windows

Installing Malware Scanning on Linux

Performing a Malware Scan

  • Prepare your test website - see the section below entitled "Prepare a test (proof of concept) Website Subfolder".
  • Create an Acunetix Target for the test website and click the "Save" button:

  • You will be taken to the Create Scan page:

  • Click on the "Scan" button
  • Select "Malware Scan" in the "Scan Type" field:

  • Click the "Create Scan" button, and wait for the scan to complete:

  • The scan result will show you that Windows Defender or ClamAV was used for malware scanning, and will show a "Malware identified" alert if malware is found.

Prepare a test (proof of concept) Website Subfolder

In this example we will assume a default installation of Apache on Ubuntu 18.04.3. The test website will be reachable on http://mytestsite/malware/, and this will be our Acunetix Target for testing.

Step 1: Prepare example website. For this single-page example, here are the contents of /var/www/html/malware/index.html:

<html>

  <head></head>

  <body>

    <h2>Testing Malware Scan"</h2><br />

    <a href="./eicar.com.txt">Test file: eicar.com.txt</a><br />

  </body>

</html>

Step 2: Add the standard "eicar.com.txt" test malware file to /var/www/html/malware/. You can obtain this from here: http://www.eicar.org/download/eicar.com.txt

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