A client once had viruses on his website downloaded from his webmaster (It’s worth remembering viruses are much like human viruses, they seem to mutate, and you don’t always know you have them straight away.) It was a nasty virus that infected every visitor that arrived on his site; can you imagine how embarrassing this was? It became very costly to him. He got hundreds of emails from clients explaining that he had damaged their computers; fortunately most people had an antivirus programme running on their machines so only little damage was actually done. There was loss of business and a few sleepless nights though.

The first rule when dealing with customers that you may have given any virus to is to never ignore their calls or emails, just reply honestly. Explaining that you’ve taken your site down and that you are fixing and are in control of the the problem. Never deny that it was your site that caused the problem, anti virus software generally never lies. Only put your site back up once your site is clean. Finding the virus coding in your website files and patching it, may not be the solution. Most customers will appreciate your honesty. Never assume your webmaster is perfect, on a regular basis ask what anti virus they are using. Of course using anti virus should be second nature to them, but you can never be too careful.