Website Hacked? No Need to Panic
October 17, 2022 | By Admin
(19 votes, average: 4.63 out of 5)
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How do I know if my site is hacked?
Website Hacked - Are you a victim of a hack or malware attack? Experiencing spam, phishing or any other fraudulent online activity? READ ON!
The First step is to check your site for any infections and then if you do discover malware you will need to remove it.
Have you been hacked?
If you think that your website is hacked, you need to confirm your doubts and verify the status of your website. Sometimes we're not sure because our website may do something strange, and we may feel that the website is hacked. It's because we are not able to distinguish between being hacked or spammed.
Your site has been hacked if you are seeing spam appearing in your site header or footer containing ads for pornography, illegal services, drugs or other inappropriate content. Usually, it is injected into your page as dark text on a dark background so it's not visible to human eyes, but search engines can see it.
Another method to check if your site has been hacked is to do a site:example.com search on Google. Replace "example.com" with your actual website name. If you see pages or content that looks malicious or not familiar to you, then the website is hacked.
Also, your site may be hacked if your visitors are being redirected to a malicious or spammy website. Pay careful attention to these because hackers know you are the site administrator and hide the spammy content from you, but will make it visible to your website visitors.
In addition, your hosting provider may send you a report that your website is behaving strangely and showing signs of spam-related activity. For example, if your host tells you that they are getting spam emails with a link to your website, it means your website is hacked. The hackers are sending spam from somewhere and using your website as a means to redirect people to their website. They do this because a link to your website will avoid spam filters while including a link to their website will get caught in spam filters.
No need to panic, cWatch masters in detecting such dubious coding and injections in a website. Their experts will remove the malware from your website in just under 30 minutes, in most cases.
Website Hacks Detect before Google does use a source code scanner.
Website hacks are not visible from a surface perspective. Of the many proactive methods, the first one would be to use a source code scanner like cWatch, which would do a thorough and systematic inspection of all your PHP and other source codes to look for malware patterns. If something is detected, you'll be alerted immediately.
Source code scanners detect hacks by looking for malware signatures that match known malware codes. But when it's a newer malware, cWatch compares your source code with a known good version of the same code. Thus newer infections, for which detection signatures may not exist, are also detectable.
Check for hacks using a remote scanner
Use remote scanners, which look at the "rendered" version of the site, if you know it is the HTML that the website produces and not the source code. So, if malware is injected into the website it would show malware only to certain users at certain times and match some particular criteria. Such infections can be detected by a remote scanner. Use a remote scanner as an additional tool since it helps catch the virus on your website.
Back up your website right now. Here's why
Once you've known the website is hacked, backup your site immediately. Use FTP, your hosting provider's backup system to download a copy of your whole website. Do not inform the hosting provider beforehand that your website is hacked; chances are they will just delete the entire site leaving you with no backup. Sounds strange, but unfortunately that is how it is. Backing up your files and database should be your first priority when you back up the website.
Now call the experts and clean your website. Now upload your website again and all vulnerabilities are taken care of. Get the most secure website safety solution.
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