tgunasekhar

Ok. I added the below line to functions.php file of the theme and it worked at least for BR tags.

It’s br tags. Even this editor removed the BR tag ??

Yes, its fixed now. Thank you all for participating in this thread and giving useful inputs. You all made it faster.

Got the response from ClamAV that they push the change in next update and I asked when that next update is planned. These companies should proactively check these bugs and fix them before thousands of websites are affected by it. Hope this update will be done ASAP. Please let us know if you see that update is already applied.

@GunasekharT signature pulled. Should be live with next update.

— ClamAV (@clamav) February 3, 2016

I have also reported to ClamAV on this false positive. But is it sufficient?

@raamdev: I wish you were right, at least in that way we would be able to solve the problem. But it is not true. The infected files and the urls scanned by other antivirus including virustotal.com which is maintained by Google finds nothing. Surprisingly the same shitty ClamAV doesn’t find anything in the entire home directory except those cache files.

Deleting the plugin, deleting cache files and re-installing the plugin doesn’t solve this problem either.

As of now it is better to disable the cache plugins and live with it until either the hosting providers make the change or ClamAV makes the change.

There is no response for email yet from plugin developers or bluehost. I just tweeted to them on the issue. I think we need to put a lot of pressure in whatever manner. Those who have the same problem, please do the same on social media.

@w3edge @bluehost Please resolve the https://t.co/qTl7nVYuuK issue in caches, help webmasters. https://t.co/b135kT9eCL

— Gunasekhar T ???? (@ReallyGuna) February 3, 2016

I have written a lengthy email to plugin developers and also asked bluehost to disable the setting. Waiting for both the replies.

One shitty antivirus is ruining many websites and the credibility of the cache plugins. The fact is we need the cache plugins without which our sites will be out of business. If the hosting providers won’t disable that setting in ClamAV antivirus, we have no option but disable this plugin.

On the other hand CloudFlare integration degraded the pagespeed and not caching a thing from my website. A very bad situation.

@shinu123 you summed it up all.

Hope the plugin developers look into this issue. As you said, getting blacklisted by search engines due to virus is the worst nightmare.

@destac: did we conclude that uninstalling the plugin is the only resolution? I think I can close the ticket then.

@destac: thanks for the detailed suggestion. I do suspect that this could be a false positive. The scanner in the Cpanel reported 17 cached files and I had scanned the related URLs and homepage with virustotal.com. None of the links are reported to have been infected. However I have deleted the cached files.

The issue here is that the hosting provider is blocking the outbound port 80 whenever they find these infected files (although it could be a false positive) which is making things worse for me.

Thanks again.

Hey Jimmy,

thanks for the enquiry. I called up the tech-support guys and found that they outbound port 80 was blocked as they found some files generated by W3 Total Cache plugin infected with a phishing virus. After deleting those files and disabling the plugin they unblocked the port and now it is normal.

I have already raised a support ticket for the plugin- https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/w3-total-chache-cached-files-contain-virus

Hi jha_final, even after deleting the infected files, they get recreated whenever those URLs are accessed, with the same virus. Before posting here, I found lot of other users also faced the same problem, but there was no resolution for the same.

My hosting provided blocked the outbound port 80 whenever they get to see these infected files, which makes the site very slow, especially wp-admin.

Finally I decided to stop using the plugin and went for free CloudFlare service which does the caching and minifying of CSS, JS and image files.

I have no solution for you, but if your main goal of using this plugin is to increase the site response I suppose you may try the cloudflare thing, if it suits you. all the best.

bcworkz, thank you. I got clearity now. With some desired parameters in the query I got it working now.

Cheers
Guna