Kuhipaat discusses how to remove malware - WP-VCD

#WordPress How to remove WP-VCD Malware?

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WordPress is an free online tool that helps us to make websites. It is easier to make websites on the WordPress platform. We use WordPress to make blogs and websites for our clients.

Few days back we had a big issue with all our WordPress websites and blogs. All of them had refused to open. Even the admin panel that helps us to administer the websites didn’t open. In a few hours, even our email servers were blocked. The server team decided to block all outbound ports to prevent the spread of the virus.

Immediately, we started scanning the server using the virus scanner available in the cpanel for possible malware attack. The virus scan returned over 100 infected files. Few of the files were not known to us. One such file was wp-vcd.php. On searching about this file on Google, we discovered that we are hacked by this very dangerous malware called WP-VCD.

WP-VCD is a WordPress malware injected by wp-vcd.php into WordPress core files. It creates a secret admin user and password to rewrite a few important files functions.php and post.php to put the malicious code. Worse is the fact that the host server team will block all outbound ports upon discovering this malware, leaving us no option to get into the admin of the WordPress websites.

How to remove WP-VCD virus

  1. Login to your cpanel and open file manager to access all the WordPress folders.
  2. Visit wp-includes folder of all your WordPress blogs / websites and delete wp-tmp.php, wp-vcd.php and wp-cd.php files.
  3. Visit wp-content/themes of all the WordPress installation and delete themes that you are not using. Be careful not to delete themes that are active. Both these 2nd and 3rd steps will reduce the number of infected file count.
  4. Try to unblock the ports by going to the Port Block Check. After a few minutes, check if you can login to any of the WordPress websites. If you can login to any of the blogs, please update the WordPress, themes and the plugins. This will clean the files because the infected files will be over-written by core files.
  5. You may also ask the server support team to unblock the ports for 15 minutes with the reason that you have found the reason of the malware attack and that you need access to clean the files.
  6. If you cannot login to the admin panels, the next option is to clean the files manually. You need to edit the wp-content/themes/{theme-name}/functions.php. This is where the malware starts spreading from. You should delete the top part of the codes till the code line as in shown in the image below. Remember that in the original code of functions.php, the theme name functions and definitions is written as a comment right after <?php
  7. After cleaning the functions.php, you should go to wp-includes and search for a file post.php. You may have a line of code right in the beginning that looks like the second image enclosed below. You must delete that line of code.
  8. There might be a few plugins which will also have this malware. Updating the plugin is the best way to get rid of it.
Functions.php inside wp-includes

If you are unable to get rid of the malware after reading the above, you may contact us for support. We will try to help you.

After all the struggles, there was this silver lining that we all learnt a lot about WordPress and its code structure. We will be confident now to customize WordPress websites with much more features and extra functionalities.

Kuhipaat is a digital marketing company specializing in making websites that deliver business objectives. We are based in Duliajan, Assam. Contact us for a free discussion of ideas about how your website can drive business for you.

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kuhipaat-brand-character for Protech - Protech Guru

Protech Guru: Use of a Brand Character to create consumer engagement.

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Introduction

Loyalty to a brand depends primarily on the consumer experience with the brand. Brand identity, which provides direction, purpose and meaning for a brand, is also linked to consumer experience and engagement.

Protech Group is a well known real estate brand in Assam and the Northeast of India. Kuhipaat was assigned the responsibilities for digital branding and marketing for the brand. The team of Kuhipaat has designed the website and the social media strategy for the brand.

Brand Problem

The team of Kuhipaat wanted to increase brand engagement for Protech Group in the digital space. Also, we wanted to increase page views for our website and our social media pages. In order to do the same, we thought of building a ‘Brand Character’ that interacts with the prospect customers on a regular basis, in a meaningful way.

Example

A great example is set by the Amul Brand. Likewise, Amul has created the character of a pleasantly plump girl in a polka dot dress with a big smile to promote Amul butter. As a result, the ‘utterly butterly girl’ has become a part of our lives as very real as any other person in our families.

Brand Character Strategy

The brand character to be designed had to fulfill the following objectives for the brand:

  1. The brand character has to be credible and trust worthy.
  2. It has to have reasons to interact with the customers consistently.
  3. Consumers need to see value in what the character has to say or offer.

The Kuhipaat team observed that consumers in general have a lot of questions regarding real estate and buying of properties. It is primarily because of the fact that home purchase is a once in a lifetime decision. Also, there were no credible websites that concentrated on the real estate problems and questions in Guwahati and the northeast of India. We arrived at a decision to fill that marketing and information gap by creating a brand character who answers questions about various aspects of real estate.

kuhipaat-brand-character for Protech - Protech Guru
OUR BRAND CHARACTER – PROTECH GURU

Hence, Protech Guru was designed as a 2D character who would help customers in taking decisions related to buying their homes. We designed the character to gain a brand image in the minds of customer when they remember about the Protech brand. It has to bring the brand to life representing the personality of the Protech brand in terms of visual identity.

The name of the brand character, ‘Protech Guru’ was meant to imply an expert, leader or a teacher. Protech Guru is the expert, who answers all the queries put forward by customers on real estate. Consequently, we have strategically defined the brand character by including the following elements into the character:

  1. A visiting card – to imply a professional of Protech Group
  2. A suitcase – to imply a experienced professional with a bag full of knowledge
  3. Formal dress with tie – to bring in maturity and formality to the character
  4. Eyeglasses – to make the character look intelligent.

Protech Guru also needed to have a defined space in the website and in the social media pages. It increases familiarity, popularity and credibility of the character. So we decided the following strategy:

  1. In the website, the FAQ page belongs to Protech Guru. He writes the FAQs. All the answers present in the FAQ page are written by him. On the FAQ page, there is a online form for visitors to ask questions to Protech Guru.
  2. On the social media pages, Protech Guru has the Thursday booked for him. Every Thursday, Protech Guru answers a question related to real estate on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages of Protech Group.

Website banner of FAQ page of ProtechGroup website
FAQ page Website Banner – Kuhipaat.

Conclusion

The main focus of the Kuhipaat team was to successfully create a brand character, promote it well and create brand and website engagement for our client, Protech Group. It gave us opportunity to create interesting content for the brand as well. As a result, the page views, and social media engagement of Protech increased, leading to successful conversion of website and Google ad leads.

What’s more, to our knowledge, Protech Guru is the first ever brand character built in Assam by a communication agency in Assam.

Kuhipaat is a digital marketing service provider with a focus on website design and development. We believe we can add significant value to our clients’ businesses through our website and online marketing strategies.

Contact us for a free consultancy by clicking here, or by writing to us at info@kuhipaat.in

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Website Design Strategy by Kuhipaat, Duliajan

Website Design Strategy – Protech

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Kuhipaat Communications and Technology Pvt. Ltd. have strategized, designed and wrote the content of the website design of Protech Group. Protech Group is a pioneer Real Estate developer in Assam having developed over 12 prime properties over a period of 10 years experiences.

It is difficult to convince people to invest in a flat as home investment is a long term investment and people always try to research and know about all possible options in the market before investing in a home. Therefore, it was a communication & digital marketing challenge for Kuhipaat to design such a website for Protech Group that will satisfy the intense research that consumers do; and decide to buy a flat at one of the projects by Protech Group.

Click here to visit the website.

Objective

The primary objective was to create an informative platform which will provide information about the projects in a way that prospective buyers come to the website and leave their details for Protech Group to contact them later.

Strategies

We have taken various long term & tactical strategies to increase the effectiveness of the website to drive business, and to create awareness about Protech Group and their excellent standards of design and quality. Here is the list of the strategies that we have executed for the website of Protech Group.

Slider home page banner

Slider banner
Slider banner

We have decided to have header banners in a slider in the homepage of the website to showcase three of the top priorities of Protech Group. It was a given that Protech would have bookings ongoing for more than one property at any given point in time. Each slider contains some contents and a link that forwards the customers to a new page having more details about the projects.

Upfront Project Details

We have created a Portfolio section of all the projects of Protech in the home page by segmenting them on the basis of the projects’ nature and customers’ interest. We have divided the projects into completed projects, ongoing projects, commercial projects and RERA approved projects. Each project in the list is presented with a project photograph, the name of the project, the location of the project and a link to a new page that has the complete project details. If the mouse cursor comes over any of the images, the page visitor can see the project details. It was added to increase activity and engagement on the website.

Project Listing of Residential Properties of Protech - Kuhipaat

We have also created a menu option called ‘Projects’ right in the top navigation menu to create upfront visibility for the projects. The menu option ‘Projects’ has a sub-menu to divide the projects into residential and commercial projects. We know that a visitor will either be looking for a residential property, or be looking for a commercial property.

Lastly, we have made a detail page for each project that is segmented into information sections. It also flags the properties where booking are ongoing, against the ones that are sold out. Each visitor may be looking at a certain kind of information more closely than the other visitor. Further, segmentation increases the readability of a long elaborate content.

The information sections are made into a menu so that the visitor can directly go to the section that he or she is interested in. The information sections are:

  1. Overview
  2. Architect’s Note
  3. Special Features
  4. Gallery
  5. Location
  6. Floor Plans
  7. Specifications
  8. Chargeables
  9. Brochure

Social Media Integration

Social media integration is critical for website and page ranking on Google search results. It also helps in the spread of information between friends and social connections. We have included the Protech Group social media page buttons in the footer for all the pages. More importantly, we have designed and coded share buttons individually for all important pages. The share buttons are present in all the project detail pages as well as in the About us page. It enables the visitor to share a particular page to his social media timeline.

Social media buttons on Protech website

Lead Generation

Lead generation was one of our key deliverables. We wanted each visitor who comes to the website to leave his contact details for further correspondence. We have executed the following strategies to meet our deliverable as efficiently as possible.

  1. We have made a red visible button on the header of the website with the phone number of the customer care team of Protech Group. It was planned in the header because the header is common in all pages and the phone number will be present in any page that the visitor hops onto.
  2. We have created a ‘Contact Us’ floater badge on the right hand side to be present in all the pages. A click on the floater badge opens up a modal window with a simple contact form linked to a database. Kuhipaat has made a web page for the CRM team to view the leads in real time to call them without any delay.
  3. We have another contact us form in the footer of the website. The footer of a website is always constant in all the pages. If anybody misses the floater badge, they may see the footer to leave their contact details and their project interest.
  4. As discussed in the previous point, we have an option for downloading the brochure of a project. We have created a form to collect the mobile number and email ID before downloading the brochure. A visitor who is downloading the brochure can be considered as a hot lead, and it was in our interest to collect his contact details.
  5. We have created an auto-popup that opens when the customer tries to close the web page. It highlights either a property or another topic with a contact us form.
  6. Lastly, we also have a ‘Contact Us’ menu option right in the top navigation that opens a webpage, which also has a detailed database connected contact us form.

Website Engagement

We have created the website with ideas that can engage customers when they visit the website. Keeping in mind about the customers’ interest, we have created two pages in the website: FAQ page and EMI Calculator. We have done the branding of FAQ page as “ProtechGuru” by starting a campaign of #GuruwarWithProtechGuru in social media channels. Protech Guru answers the questions related to real estate. We have created an option on the FAQ page for the customers to submit their questions to Protech Guru. Even when the customer is submitting a question, we are capturing his or her contact details.

FAQ of Protech Website

The EMI Calculator is an often used tool by any home seeking consumer. The tool that we embedded gives out the EMI amount, interest amount and the total payout amount, when we input the loan amount, interest and loan tenure.

SEO & Website Ranking

The Protech website is registered with Google and Bing. Kuhipaat has successfully worked on contents as well as the technical sides of the Protech website for the SEO purpose so that the website appears in the first page of the search results in some particular chosen keywords. We have successfully made the Protech website recognized in organic search. The website comes in the first page for all the chosen keywords.

We have done on page SEO in each page of the website (including Meta keywords, Meta description, alt tags, Social media tags, OG tags etc) and used focus keywords and phrases for each page. Sitemap and Robots.txt files were created and uploaded onto the root folder of the website. It tells the search engines about the different pages, and the pages and folders that needn’t be crawled. The kuhipaat team has used Breadcrumb at the top of the page above title and content which navigates the hierarchy level of user’s location in the site.

Protech website blogs

We have created and managed the blog section of the website to increase site ranking by increasing site visits. We have written interesting blogs related to real estate, interior decor, general tips etc. that attract the consumers. The blog writing was done by the team. Yoast SEO tool was used to do On-page SEO for the blogs written by us.

Device Responsiveness

With the increase in smart phones, and the lowering of data rates, mobile viewership of websites have increased significantly. 99% of the website visits come from mobile devices. It was therefore essential that the website looks equally good on a mobile screen. It should adapt to a smaller screen without any issue. We have worked on the responsiveness for different screen resolutions of different devices including tablets. One can open the site in any devices like mobile, tab or pad, it is device optimized.

Protech website mobile view
Mobile view of Protech Website

Conclusion

Thus, Kuhipaat has designed the Protech website with the above mentioned strategies. The strategies we have taken, increased the ranking of the website in search results page of the search engines like Google and Bing on some particular chosen keywords such as ‘Best real estate builder in assam’, ‘Best real estate brand in assam’ etc. Protech was able to sell almost 100 flats in the last year because of these website strategies.

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SEO & Inbound Marketing

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I can’t help but start with some of the great Seth Godin quotes when I am dwelling the topic of Inbound Marketing. I love his quotes even otherwise.

He says, “If you can’t sell to 1 in 1000, why market to a million?”. He also says, “People don’t believe what you tell them. They rarely believe what you show them. They often believe what their friends tell them. They always believe what they tell themselves.”

These statements make the basis of Inbound Marketing. Lets understand Inbound Marketing before really delving into how SEO would help it.
Let me intersperse this blog with some of my favourite Seth Godin quotes. Would that be boring. Please allow me. Why waste a sentence saying nothing?”
Traditionally, and most marketers today, generate leads and fill the top of their sales funnel through bulk email blasts, SMS push marketing to legal or illegal lists, trade shows, seminars, internal cold calling, outsourced telemarketing and advertising. These are “outbound marketing” activities where a marketer pushes the message out through different media options hoping that it will reach the target consumer.
Although there is a high probability that the message would reach the targeted consumer, yet there are a few basic concerns.
  • The message is a generic message designed to appeal the large target consumer set.
  • The message is one among millions of other messages targeting similar TG profile.
  • There are consumer & Government activism to block generic messages using Spam filters, Caller ID etc and frequent shifting of channels.
  • Once the message reaches the target consumer, the follow up communication strategy is not existent. Mostly the marketing team broadcasts the message, and then the business teams tries to track leads and conversions.
Basically, it was about buy, beg and bug consumers spending millions of advertising dollars to sell. These days are getting over, quickly, with consumers in control of the information they receive.

“Change almost never fails because it’s too early. It almost always fails because it’s too late.”

Inbound Marketing is the change. Its the Marketing 2.0. It is about the practice of bringing warm, qualified leads into the sales funnel and follow them up through communication till they explicitly or implicitly express dis-interest. The basis was again Seth Godin’s Permission based marketing.

“Permission Marketing is just like dating. It turns stranger into friends and friends into lifetime customers. Many of the rules of dating apply, and so do many of the benefits.”


Half of Inbound Marketing is about great marketing content. And the second half is about having strategies and techniques to engage the interested consumer till conversion. Human beings have a finite amount of attention. The attention is therefore spent only on things that interests you. Once great content attracts the attention, inbound marketing is supposed to capture that attention, engage with the attention, make a relationship to exchange more content. The attention would either become a customer, or become an ambassador of the brand/product.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization plays a critical role in capturing attention of consumers searching for content that resonates with the content provided by the brand. Search engines have become the default option to search for content. Students search before asking their teachers. Employees search before asking their peers or bosses.

“Expectations are the engines of our perceptions.”
If you want to dig a big hole, you need to stay in one place.”

SEO as I discussed in the previous blog, is not only about making your website optimized to be found in all relevant search keywords, but also about creating content in the social media and other Internet eco-systems. The latter simply means that others would equally work hard to get your content across to relevant consumers.

For instance, if you write a post in www.mouthshut.com, mouthshut would work hard to get that searched by relevant keywords. Then if you share that post through google plus, twitter, tumblr etc, they further work hard to get that searched.

Finally, even if your relevant website page is coming in the second page of the search result, the same content may come right in the front of the search result through other websites.

This is called Content SEO, and not Website SEO.

“Ideas in secret die. They need light and air or they starve to death.”

Let your content be that idea. Use proper SEO techniques and inbound marketing strategies as light and air, or they would starve to death.

The author has an experience of 18 years in the integrated communication domain involving traditional as well as digital media. He can be contacted at durlov@kuhipaat.in for consultancy and project execution.

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