So, how do you know if your site has been hacked?
Hacked
Since the invention of the computer, hackers have been doing their level best to get into them for various nefarious reasons known only to themselves.
In the beginning, credit card information was their primary target however these days, they inject malicious code into websites to destroy competition, deface a website, promote their own websites, promote their own products, steal personal information or
just screw with you.
Learning how to know if your site has been hacked is important in order to minimize the potential damage to your site and your site’s visitors.
There are many telltale signs that could indicate that your site has been hacked.
Among them are the following:
When you click on a domain and Google serves a pop up indicating that you are entering a potentially dangerous site, it’s a good indicator that your site has been hacked.
If you click on your website and your web browser tells you that there is malware on your domain, your site has been hacked.
One of the most common and obvious signs is when you click on your domain and an unfamiliar website opens. Often the site is in a foreign country and language.
When your website is redirected to another site it is a sure indicator that your site has been injected with a dialer.
Another sign is when your website looks perfectly o.k. but when you click on some of your outgoing links, they redirect you to another web site other than where you intended.
When this occurs, you can be sure that malware has infected your entire site.
Another common indicator that your site has been hacked is when your site theme, usuallyin WordPress or Joomla, loads incorrectly or begins to look “weird” or unusual.
This is an early indicator that you site has been infected.
Finally, when you start getting emails from your subscribers telling you that they have received Trojan or virus warnings from your site, you can be 100% sure that your site has been hacked.
Usually websites that have not been regularly updated are prime targets for hackers but any website on the Internet can be hacked.
Once you have determined that your site has been hacked and you are sharing web hosting, you need to immediately follow these steps to get your site back online.
If you can log into the control panel of your web hosting provider, immediately change your password.
If you can login by FTP with your new password and you have a backup copy of your website, you can upload the backup copy by FTP and download any new pages that could have been added to your site by the hacker.
This can also be accomplished through your control panel if you choose.
Once you upload the backup copy of your site to your web host, you will need to contact them and let them know exactly what happened.
Normally, after they go through your website logs, your web host’s abuse department will contact you with additional information on which files were infected, how extensive the
infection was and how the hacker gained access to your site in the first place.
In the event you are unable to login to your control panel or by FTP access your site files, you need to immediately contact your host provider.
Depending on your service provider, they should be able to restore your account to its original state.
Often it’s a good idea to take a screen shot of your site when you first had an indication that your site was hacked, especially if it was a redirect to another site, and send it to your webhost.
Sending the screen shot to your web host along with any pages of your site that were added by the hackers, will help them ferret out how the hackers gained access.
Since your site has been hacked, you will probably already have a Trojan or a virus downloaded to your computer when you tried to access your site.
You should immediately run an antivirus or malware program on your computer to clean up any malware infection.
It’s important that you run a FULL virus scan on all disks you had attached to your computer when you accessed your site.
Malwarebytes or an equivilent program will do the job nicely.
Now that you know that your site has been hacked and what to do about it, I’ll bet you just can’t wait to see how to prevent it from happening again.
Why someone would hack my website is the first question I asked myself when my websites were recently hacked.
Whoever did the deed caused me a lot of down time, a great deal of money, a substantial loss of readership and potential damage to our Home Based Internet Marketing Information site’s reputation.
Why someone would hack my website seemed to be a mystery; especially since no financial information is ever posted on it?
It’s not a bank site, it’s not an AdSense site, a membership site or a storefront. So, why would someone bother?
Well after doing quite a bit of researach, I came up with the following reasons that should interest everyone having a web presence.
- Theft of user information
- Theft of server information
- Search Engine Optimization
- Promoting other people’s products or services
- Hosting objectionable and/or illegal content
- Intentionally defacing a website
- Malicious mischief
Theft of user information is probably the most obvious and frequent reason for the hacking of websites.
Regardless of what type website you run, hackers can collect a surprising amount of personal information that can be used for identity theft or other nefarious reasons.
Even the most basic information can be useful to a hacker.
At a minimum, “user”s will store their email address, password, username, etc. along with other “users” information.
Theft of your list of users’ information could give hackers access to your members’ accounts on other websites
A users email address on a popular website is a valuable commodity and can be sold for a great deal of money to list builders and other hackers.
Email addresses can be used by hackers to run spam email campaigns without the knowledge of the user or to gain access to a users other accounts online.
Unfortunately, the majority of people on the Internet use the same user name and password to access multiple website accounts.
You should never have the same user name and password on multiple websites, but the fact remains that over 70% of users do.
Although most websites do not store passwords in plain text, even password hashes can be useful to hackers.
Theft of Server Information is another reason why someone would hack my website.
In addition to stealing your users’ information from your website, hackers could be looking for information stored on your server.
Your server stores your database, email addresses, user name and password for all the sites they host for you.
Hackers with access to that type of information could easily steal additional information, mess with your site’s content or do other nasty things to your websites.
Hackers are able to find security holes via SQL injection, alter your Database records to include Javascript includes that will either execute a dialer or inject web links for SEO purposes, to increase page rank or to promote products or services to make money for themselves.
Search Engine Optimization is yet another reason why someone would hack my website.
We all know that one of the best ways to improve a site ranking in the search engines is to have back-links to website content from other sites that have some value in related searches.
Websites with a high relevancy to a particular search term that have
links to other websites from it, give the other websites the probability of also having a high relevancy to that search term.
This is why hackers frequently execute dialers or inject web link redirects onto a site.
The web links are frequently not even on the same subject matter as your website, in fact they may not even be in your language.
Often, just to increase the number of times their website shows up in the search results, hackers will insert links to some malicious website that simply tries to harm other people’s computers.
They also might try to promote their own products or services by inserting links, visible or otherwise on your site.
Visible links give your visitors the impression that you support the other site that’s being promoted however, it’s easier to discover that your site has been hacked when the hackers use this technique.
This is a good reason to monitor your website on a regular basis.
Hackers often inject links to malicious websites that can harm your users’ computers or sell products and services that are fraudlent.
They use your website’s good reputation and ranking to promote their nasty deeds.
Hosting objectionable and/or illegal content is a type of website defacement that has a definite purpose.
Adult, pornographic, illegal and objectionable websites often have problems with their hosting.
When hosting is unattainable or too expensive, hackers will often resort to trying to use other people’s websites to host their own site content.
If this should happen, your website could be shut down and you could be subject to civil liabilities or even criminal penalties.
In the event your site is not immediately shut down, your hosting costs will skyrocket because of the unusually large amount of video content or photos that are being uploaded.
Intentionally defacing a website is something that can occur with any type of site, particularly if it has more than two users.
There is usually no rhyme or reason behind intentionally defacing a site other than someone just wanting to cause you an embarrassment.
Hackers don’t necessarily need a reason to deface your website. Some do it just for the hell of it and others do it just to add a website to their “resume” of hacked sites.
All websites are vulnerable.
User mischief is another reason why someone would hack your website
If you run a forum, a gaming site, a photography site or a site with any kind of social interactive element to it, you will eventually run across a user who will cause you mischief.
Facebook users experience this type of user mischief on a daily basis but it’s been going on long before Facebook and “social networking” became stylish.
This type of attack rarely serves any useful purpose. It’s seems to be just the dark side of human nature.
Unfortunately, many people who use the Internet just enjoy embarrassing or harming other people, and as meaningless as it is, they spend an inordinate amount of time and energy doing so.
Website security is an important consideration for all websites and should be taken seriously.
Regardless of how simple or large your website, no website in existence is immune to all the things I have described above.
As I was trying to figure out why someone would hack my website, it became apparent that if your website hasn’t been the target of a hacker attack yet, it’s just a matter of time before they discover you.
One way anyone can easily make money online is by making directory submissions for webmasters who have better things to do with their time.
Believe it or not, many people on the Internet have learned to make money online making directory submissions.
Everyone knows that in order to be successful online you need a constant flow of web traffic to your website or blog.
Although there are a plethora of ways to develop traffic for a website, using directory submissions to get noticed is one of the quickest ways to get things going and to submit your website to the various website directories.
To do this properly and for it to be most effective, directory submissions are best done manually.
Since there are literally thousands of directory sites online, you can see that even with directory submission software the task becomes quite labor intensive.
A website must be submitted in the correct category, sub category, using the correct keywords in the title and website description if it is to be accepted by the directory.
Many directories have a captcha which must be filled out and some also require an email confirmation before the site is accepted.
Although many automatic directory submission software programs are available for making directory submissions, they still require some human “hands on” TLC if they are to be effective.
And, this takes time to accomplish.
Since most webmasters, bloggers and Internet marketers are swamped with the other aspects of maintaining a website, creating content and marketing; anyone with a computer and some spare time can earn money online making directory submissions.
In fact most webmasters will eagerly welcome someone to do this type work for them.
You can start by going to the various forums and offering your services to the webmasters to submit their sites to the directories for a reasonable fee.
Site Points Logo
Forums like Site Points and Digital Point are great places to start offering your service to webmasters and Internet marketers.
I think you will be surprised how much money you can actually earn online making directory submissions once you streamline your operation and acquire a good directory submission program.
