Deep Dive - What is Imunify360 and why do we use it to protect our Shared Web Hosting platform?

31 Aug 2023, by Slade Baylis

In our security-focused articles in the past, we’ve covered a lot about the security services that we offer for the high-end of town.  This includes dedicated firewalls, Web Application Firewalls (WAFs), simulated phishing campaigns, vulnerability scanning, and more.  However, we haven’t touched on how we secure our entry-level platforms, such as our Shared Web Hosting (SWH) platform.

This month we aim to rectify that!  We’ll be discussing “Imunify360” - the comprehensive security suite that we use on our Shared Web Hosting (SWH) platform to help our users remain secure.

What is Imunify360? 

Before we begin, a quick background and introduction to our Shared Web Hosting (SWH) platform.  This is the standard entry point to the world of hosting for most customers - as it’s the most affordable and offers all the functionality required to have a website, as well as set up email accounts. 

On this SWH platform, we use a piece of software called cPanel, which allows for easier management of the server as an administrator; provides an easy-to-use self-service portal so our clients can manage their own hosting; as well as – with the help of Imunify360 – dramatically increases security for these hosting environments.  For more information on cPanel, check out our previous What are web hosting control panels and which one is best? article.

Imunify360 is a robust software security suite that integrates with cPanel in such a way that it both helps administrators increase the security of the server, as well as helps users increase the security of their websites.  However, it isn’t only used with cPanel servers – due to Imunify360 increasing the security of servers and helping to keep the end-user safe, we also recommend it for any of our clients running their own Linux servers on our KVM VPS, or VMware platforms.

Some of the key advantages of Imunify360 are that it’s able to swiftly identify and eliminate malware in real time, help block application-level attacks, provide advanced firewall functionality, as well as keep on top of emerging threats using real-time threat intelligence.  To fully understand these benefits, we’ll need to go into further detail about how they’re implemented.

What features does Imunify360 come with?

At a high level, Imunify360 can be thought of as an antivirus, firewall, WAF, and intrusion detection system all in one – with features that include:

Malware Scanning & Automatic Disinfection – Through thorough and immediate malware scanning of files as they are uploaded or modified, threats are proactively defended against before they can get a foothold.  This helps prevent your website and server from being used for distributing malware, being used as a hosting environment for phishing attacks that will target others, or engaging in other malicious activities. 

In addition to real-time malware scanning, regular antivirus malware scans also run in the background on the server to ensure the server remains clean. Not only that, but when bringing your hosting services from another provider to a server running Imunify360, these malware scans will scan the entire contents of the account for signs of malicious activity and can even be set to automatically fix any issues it detects. 

Due to the previously mentioned integration with cPanel, administrators and end-users are also able to trigger malware scans of hosting accounts or even individual folders through the cPanel dashboards where users manage their hosting environments.

Intrusion Detection and Prevention – Similar to the malware detection feature above with real-time scanning of files, this “Intrusion Detection” feature also acts in real-time by constantly monitoring server logs, network traffic, and other system activities.  It acts as a guardian on the server, keeping a watchful eye that looks for anomalies or suspicious behaviour that might be evidence of a cyber-attack. 

After scanning and analysing these logs from several different angles, if the system detects any signs of malicious activity, it’s able to work with the in-built network firewall to ban any further connections from the related IP addresses. 

Web Application Firewall (WAF) – With regular firewall functionality only protecting a server at the networking level, more protection is needed to protect hosted applications from attacks that look to exploit weaknesses in their code.  The good news is that this form of protection is available without the high-costs that are usually required – though in a more basic form.

This basic WAF functionality acts as a defensive barrier, intercepting, scrutinising, and blocking any requests that appear to be malicious or harmful.  Through its “Proactive Defence” technology, it’s able to detect and block malicious execution flow in runtime, meaning it is able to either block the entire script execution or just block the malicious portion of the request!

Herd Antivirus – Pulling the term from the same medical field that inspired the term computer “virus”, Imunify360 implements a technology it refers to as cloud-based “herd immunity” through accumulating cyber-attack data, analysing it in real time, and producing protection rules that are distributed to all users. 

This effectively means that servers protected with this feature act together to block new and emerging threats for everyone that have only ever been seen by a few servers with Imunify360 installed.

What platforms is Imunify360 able to be used on?

As touched on earlier, whilst our Shared Web Hosting (SWH) platform runs cPanel and Imunify360 in parallel, the good news is that it’s able to be used with most of the common Linux distributions that are out there.

Here is a list of each of the Linux distributions that Imunify360 is usable with:

• CloudLinux OS 6, 7 & 8
• Ubuntu 16, 18 & 20
• CentOS 6, 7 & 8
• Debian 9 & 10 
• RHEL 6, 7 & 8
• AlmaLinux 8

In addition to this, along with the integration with the cPanel interface, it also provides integration for other web hosting panels that are available.

Here is a list of each of the hosting control panels that Imunify360 is compatible with:

• cPanel & WHM
• Direct Admin
• Plesk

It’s also usable with servers that use other control panels that aren’t mentioned above, such as the free Centos Web Panel, however it doesn’t integrate into their administrator and end-user dashboards like it does with the panels mentioned above.

Why we use Imunify360 – Greatly increase security without dramatically increasing cost

Overall, Imunify360 is able to offer real-time protection and a dynamic and adaptive security mechanism that constantly analyses threat data, quickly responds to emerging threats, and actively adapts to ensure that web servers and websites remain shielded against the latest and most sophisticated cyber-attacks.

It is for these reasons that we believe it’s the best tool for increasing the security on our Shared Web Hosting (SWH) platform, as well why we recommend it to our clients running their own cPanel and Plesk servers.

Looking to find out more about Imunify360 or other ways of improving your security?

If you have any other questions about how Imunify360 works, or just looking how to increase the security on your website specifically, let us know! 

You can call us on 1300 769 972 (Option #1) or email us at sales@micron21.com