Is your website hacked? – Check the steps to follow?
Overview:
Online frauds have become increasingly unpredictable and sometimes difficult to prevent because hackers are inventing new ways by day. Not even your websites are safe anymore. If your website gets hacked, a lot of bad things can happen including committing crimes using your site. You as the owner may be completely freaked out and not know how to handle such a mess. However, when your website gets hacked, follow the following step by step guide to recover it back.
Do Not Panic
Once your website has been hacked, it is normal to freak out, but no, it is not the end of the world. Try as much as you can to remain calm because after all, being depressed or angry about it won’t do you any good. You need all that energy, total calmness, and full concentration to make the next step in recovering your website.
Identify the Problem
You need to know exactly how you have been hacked because sometimes it can be mere speculation. At first, you need to check if you can log in to your website as an admin anymore, check if after trying logging in you are being redirected to other websites or if your website contains new links that you didn’t add or authorize to be added. Check also whether Google has marked it as insecure. Now you have located your hack and can go ahead to the next step.
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Work with Your Hosting Company
Your host should be able to help in such a situation because most of them through experience have been able to handle hacking problems. In case your website is hosted together with other websites then the hosting company will tell you how the hack started and identify loopholes that need to be amended to avoid future occurrences.
Involve a Professional
Sometimes the attack can be very severe requiring immediate attention, and this is the time you need to hire a professional to help. You might wait or decide to do it yourself only to make things worse as time goes on. Act fast and in the right way because the faster you get everything fixed on your website, the safer it will be. If you are not an IT specialist, consider hiring a qualified tech-savvy.
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Consider a Fair Downgrade
If you the kind of person who has been upgrading and updating your site from one version to a better one, you can take this chance and restore your website to a previous version before the hacking happened. But this would be possible if you usually keep a backup of your previous versions before upgrading. Unfortunately, you will lose any content you added to the website including images. However, the whole process is worthwhile because you will be cleaning your site from the hack and can always add the contents later after learning how to secure your site.
Scan and Remove Malware
If you have not been updating themes and plugins on your website, you should know that you have been leaving a backdoor open for the hackers to access your website. The bad thing is that the hackers can continue accessing your site once they are in without you noticing. Make sure that all your plugins are updated and this way you will detect any change in real-time. In short, keep everything up-to-date. The updated security plugins will regularly scan your website and therefore keep it safe.
Who Is Allowed To Access Your Website?
You have to regularly check the permissions granted to every user on your website to ensure no unauthorized user is accessing it. You should also check if the users’ permissions are as per granted to ensure no member of the team overrides the other. Sometimes an employee leaves an organization, and no one bothers to block them from using the website, and some can be very malicious. Watch out for any malicious user and kick them out with immediate effect.
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Change All Security Keys and Passwords
Once you have recovered your website, change all the passwords and security keys. In doing this, make sure they are strong, unique and hard to hack.
While cyber scams are increasing by the day, you have a responsibility to improve your security measures to avoid being hacked. However, when the hacking happens, use this ultimate guide to recover your website.
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Author Bio: Adrian Rubin is a talented story writer and photographer. He has worked with several news houses in Philadelphia as an editor. While Adrian Rubin is not writing, he is either traveling or taking photos. He is also a humanitarian who loves animals.
