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Hacker attacks occur every day. If your site has not fallen victim to them, then either you are well-prepared, or you are the luckiest person on the planet. As the most commonly used CMS, WordPress is well-equipped for resisting any attacks. Still, there are no bounds to the creativity of hackers. That’s why it good to have WordPress technical support.
How can you check if your page has been hacked?
A hacker attack on a website is most often associated with its loss, blocking, or replacement. However, sometimes it is impossible to see the attacker’s interference with the naked eye. For example, they may have added just one line of code to access all of your clients’ data, and you won’t know a thing.
How do you then know if a page has been hacked? First of all, check your site using Google Search Console. In addition to many other advantages, the tool provided by the Mountain View giant also monitors your website for infection. If it detects malicious code, it will send relevant information in an email.
The most “drastic” form of notifying the site’s owner of the danger are red-colored background notifications given by browsers. Sometimes some users can see them, and some cannot. hat is why you should never underestimate any reports by the users of your website.
Often, it is by accident that the owner finds out their site has been infected, for example, by checking Google search results. While the infected pages appear under their URLs, the content is unrelated, offensive, illegal, and usually in other languages. Another symptom of an attack may be a rapid drop in the rank of search results.
Frequent verification of your domain frequently using the “site: yourdomain.com” command in Google is a good practice as this allows you to verify whether you have been attacked quickly.
If you use such services as 24/7 website monitoring, your software house will inform you whenever something terrible happens to your website. A professional company providing WordPress technical support will not only verify your website but will also send you text notifications about the problems.
What do hackers actually do?
Hackers usually attack for fun or as a challenge. Also, they often work for somebody else. Their goal is usually to cause as much damage as possible, as well as to steal data or technology. How can they harm your business? Here are some examples of hacker activities:
- DDoS attack: its purpose is to block a network server or to crash the entire network by a massive number of queries. Doing so prevents the server from performing any services, including displaying a page and sending or receiving mail. While it is easy to protect against it, it still happens a lot.
- Sniffing: monitoring and saving passwords of administration and ordinary users of secured systems. A hacker seizes passwords and usernames using a sniffer program.
- Content injection: one of the most common attacks during which a hacker adds malicious JavaScript or HTML code (e.g., iframe) to the page’s source code.
- Unwantedlinks: the most often unwanted content are links to external websites hidden by using CSS. They aim to increase the ranking of linked pages in search engines. It is also possible to show different content to search engine robots and to website users (cloaking).
- Unwanted content: the attack consists of massive adding of subpages to your website. Since Google mistreats spamming sites, this may lead to a significant reduction in your website ranking or to blocking your page.
- Redirects: a hacker may inject code into your website’s source code that redirects some users to spammy or malicious pages.
Specialized companies dealing with website monitoring and technical support of systems such as WordPress have numerous tools to improve monitoring, prevention, and reporting of attacks. That is why hiring a professional company is the best way of preventing hacker attacks and responding quickly to them.
A hacker attack: how to protect yourself and how to remove malicious code from your website?
Updating is the primary and daily protection against attacks. Firstly, there are security vulnerabilities discovered every day, and the job of the updates is to “patch” them. Secondly, hackers are never idle, continually expanding their tools. That is why you should always try to keep WordPress CMS and all the plugins updated. If you are afraid of errors or losing data, hire a software house to do this.
Website backups should also be yet another routine task. The more often you do them, the better. Many servers do automatic backups and restoring as part of their services. Still, the best solution is to hire a company that provides WordPress technical support. SiteCare will not only find the vulnerability, resolve the problem, but also make sure your website withstands similar attacks in the future.
If malicious code has been added to the source code, you should try to remove it. To do so, check the following files: index.php, index.html, header.php, footer.php, and others related to the main page. However, bear in mind that this method does not guarantee the total eradication of the problem. Also, make sure to scan your computer with an anti-virus program before and after doing this.
