How to Fix the “Site Ahead Contains Harmful Programs” Warning

In some cases, when you visit a website you will be told that it contains malware. The warning appears in English or Vietnamese, for example:

• Browser in English: “The site ahead contains harmful programs”
• Browser in Vietnamese: “The site you are about to visit contains harmful programs”

When you see this, it means Google has flagged the website as unsafe. The site may contain malicious code or may have been hacked. Both visitors and site administrators want to fix it. Today’s article Mona Media will help you fix the “The site ahead contains harmful programs” warning in detail. We cover the fixes the WordPress source code, on Chrome and on Firefox.

Causes of the “The site ahead contains harmful programs” warning

The first thing to do is find out why your website is being flagged for harmful programs. Once you know the cause, you can fix it for good, and it will not happen to your website a second time.

The warning usually appears because of hackers, malicious code, or malicious links on the website. When visitors see these warnings, they will not click into your website.

Besides these 2 main causes, it can also be because you inserted low-quality ads on your site. These embedded codes are not safe and do not protect information. When Google finds suspicious code, it will also warn about phishing or malware, and Google will warn users not to visit that website.

Go to Google Transparency Report and enter your website’s URL, then wait for the result. You will find out what is causing the warning.

See more How to check a link for viruses and check that it is safe

Malware warnings appear in these forms:

• Warning: The site ahead contains malware.
• Notice: The site ahead contains harmful programs
• Warning: This page is trying to load scripts from unauthenticated sources. This warning tells you that you are trying to load scripts from unsafe, unverified sources.
• Warning: Deceptive Site Ahead or Deceptive Website Warning. A warning that the website is a phishing site.

How to fix the “The site ahead contains harmful programs/deceptive site” warning

You can find and remove the malicious code, take these results down, or report to Google. Let’s go through each way of handling the deceptive or malware warning below:

1. Find and remove malicious code from your website

There are now many malware scanning toolsand firewall tools that save you effort compared with searching by hand. You can use Imunify 360, WordFence, iThemes Security and others. These tools help you find clean files so you can delete the files with malicious warnings.

Wordfence Security is another standout tool today. With iThemes Security you can scan your website for malicious code and see the affected files. Sucuri gives you a detailed report of the files that contain malware.

Whichever way you choose, before you start you should back up your website data to keep your information safe. Restoring a clean version of your website is safer.

2. Remove the malware warning from Google search results

You will need to ask Google to re-verify your website’s security and safety after you have found and fixed the problem.

Go to Google Search Console and sign in to your account. Then check the security features and click Request a review. You will tell Google the current state of your website and that you have fixed it. Ask Google to remove the malware warning for you. It may take 1 day to 1 week for the warning to be removed.

After you fix the “The site ahead contains harmful programs” warning, you should use more SSL certificate, to strengthen your website security to avoid it happening again. In particular, avoid linking to gambling or illegal websites. Check your website for malware regularly.

 3. Fix it directly in Chrome and Firefox

If you are a visitor who needs the information on the website, or you are sure the warnings are nothing to worry about, you may want to turn them off so you can keep using your browser. The method depends on whether you use Chrome or Firefox.

How to fix it in Chrome

Turning off Safe Browsing in Chrome is not recommended. But if you want to, you can do it like this:

• Open Chrome and sign in to your Chrome account.
• Then type “chrome://setting” in the URL bar. Or use the menu in the top right corner and choose Settings.
• Press Enter, and Chrome Settings will show many options. Choose Sync and Google services.
• In Sync and Google services, scroll down and find Safe Browsing, then turn it off.

How to fix it in Firefox

Similar to Chrome, you can turn off safe browsing features in Firefox. We do not recommend this either. If you still want to turn off the warning, do this:

Open Firefox. In the top right corner there are three bars. Click them and a list of options will appear.

The option you need is Privacy & Security. Here you can choose not to receive warnings or turn off other options you do not want.

After these steps in Chrome or Firefox, you can visit the website without the warning. However, this can also cause you to download unsafe resources to your device. You may want to look for a safer website instead.

For administrators, fixing the “The site ahead contains harmful programs” warning is very important. Not every visitor has the knowledge to recognize that these warnings are harmless. If this keeps happening, your website will quickly drop in Google rankings.

See more:

• Guide to fixing common WordPress errors
• Guide to fixing the Syntax Error