Steps to Take if Your Website Gets Hacked: How to Detect, Recover, and Prevent Future Attacks

Website hacking refers to malicious actors gaining unauthorized access to change a website by exploiting vulnerabilities in code or stolen login credentials. If your site gets hacked, it can mean corrupted files, stolen data, spam content, and traffic loss.

Prompt action is required to detect, stop, and reverse the damage and prevent repeat attacks.

This article covers key steps if you suspect your site was compromised.

Detecting Unauthorized Changes

Watch for these signs that may indicate your website has been hacked:

• Visible website alterations like unknown pages, posts, media, or layout issues. This signals the hacker was able to alter actual files. Review all site areas closely.
• The sudden influx of spam comments, especially with suspicious links. Hackers can exploit holes to post comments. Check for anything abnormal.
• Unfamiliar files appear in your hosting account that you still need to upload. Strange scripts, executables, or zip files likely mean malicious code.
• The sharp drop in website traffic and search rankings as users abandon the site and Google penalizes it for seeming unsafe. Monitor analytics for changes.

Securing Your Website

Once aware of a hack, urgently take measures to lock down access:

• Immediately change all related passwords to strong new secure ones, including hosting, FTP, and CMS admin. Prevent access with compromised credentials. Enable two-factor authentication if offered.
• Check for and remove suspicious files, plugins, or code enabling malicious activity. Download all files to inspect them closely if needed.
• Force log out all users from your hosting panel and CMS. Cached sessions could still give hackers access despite password changes.
• Request your hosting provider perform a comprehensive malware scan of files and server logs to uncover infections like spyware, bots, and backdoors left by hackers.

Cleaning Up Your Website

After tightening security, focus on restoring your site:

• Run additional malware scanners like Sucuri SiteCheck to find lingering threats. Entirely remove any infections discovered.
• Restore original clean files from backups if needed to undo unauthorized changes. Use known good backups from before the hack timeframe.
• Publish new high-quality content to regain search engine rankings. Google sees this as a signal your site recovered from spam and malware penalties.
• Closely monitor all site activity for anomalies indicating repeated attacks. Watch for new, unfamiliar files, content changes, and traffic shifts.

Preventing Future Attacks

Implement these measures to protect your site from future threats better:

• Maintain software like CMS, plugins, and themes updated. Outdated versions with vulnerabilities are attractive hacker targets.
• Use strong passwords, password managers, and two-factor authentication where possible. Good password hygiene restricts access.
• Limit user roles and permissions. Give only necessary access to prevent wider exposure if an account is compromised.
• Be cautious of suspicious emails, links, and downloads that could be ploys to infect your computer with malware giving hackers site access.
• Regularly back up your website to easily roll back to a pre-hack state if impacted again. Test restoration process.

Conclusion

Getting hacked can be a disruptive and even devastating event for a website. However, detecting an attack quickly and then taking decisive steps to secure accounts, eliminate malware, restore backups, monitor closely, and harden your site against