Website Hacking and Issues Therein

Getting your website hacked is not a new thing. The websites are usually prone to get hacked, and there are various steps that you must take to get rid of such issues. The website is a property of a single person, company or multiple individuals. The famous websites are at a risk always that they might get hack by someone. It is a common issue that people and companies are discussing recently. The cyber-crime of hacking the websites is not increasing with the passage of time.

In 2014, the total number of websites on the internet reached 1 billion. Today it’s hovering somewhere in the neighborhood of 944 million due to websites going inactive, and it is expected to normalize again at 1 billion sometime in 2015. Let’s take a minute to absorb that number for a moment 1 billion.

Another surprising statistic is that Google, one of the most popular search engines in the world, quarantines approximately 10,000 websites a day via its Safe Browsing technology. From our own research, out of the millions of websites that push through our scanning technology, roughly 2 – 5% of them have some Indicator of Compromise (IoC) that signifies a website attack. Granted, this might be a bit high, as the websites being scanned are often suspected of having an issue, so to be conservative we would extrapolate that to suggest about 1% of the total websites online are hacked or infected. To put that into perspective, we are talking somewhere in the neighborhood of 9 million websites that are currently hacked or infected.

With this sort of impact, it’s only natural that people are curious how websites keep getting hacked. The challenge is that the answer has been the same for quite some time.

What to do if your Website has Been Hacked?

First Steps You Should Take

It is also necessary to analyze the hacking of your website to find out soft spots in the code and eliminate them as soon as possible. You should also remember that very often hackers after having got access to your website prefer to reserve ways for further hacking of your web resource. Only a specialist is able to uncover such ways.

So, here follows step-by-step guidelines what to do in case your website has been hacked:

1. Check your home PC for viruses. It is not necessary to run to the shop and buy a commercial antivirus. We would recommend using Antivira and Comodo.
2. Install FireWall to your local PC. Use of FireWall significantly reduces the risk of penetration of malware to your PC. We would recommend to use Comodo, free and one of the best FireWalls, or Zone Alarm, also a very good but commercial alternative.
3. Contact your hosting provider. Not only your website may have been hacked, especially if you do not rent your own server but use usual hosting. Notify the administrators and ask them to analyze the hacking.
4. Change all the passwords, from passwords to mail boxes to FTP passwords.
5. Warn your users that your website has been hacked and recommend them to change their passwords to your website.
6. Back up all the files at your server without delay.
7. Check the code of the file .htaccess. A hacker can use this file to forward your visitors from your web resource to a website with a malicious code installed.
8. Be prepared that it might be necessary to delete all the files from your server. The installed code may be hidden so well that it may be necessary to delete all the files and the data base from your server.
9. Update your CMS to the newest version.

To sum up, it is easier to prevent hacking the website than to restore the website from scratch. Your website protection is a big responsibility only experts can deal with. One should not entrust a website to the first comer but it is not advisable to neglect security either.

Hacking

There are two types of the companies; one type of companies was subject to the hacking issue, but the other ones are safe. The safe companies must have some measures taken to secure themselves and get rid of the hacking issues. There are various people, viruses, and malware threats that can hack the websites and do some damage to the content and the users. Hacking is a common problem, but the webmasters must be skilled enough to get rid of such problems and prevent them from the damage or any harm.

Get to Know

Have you ever thought that how will you find out if your website is not yours now? How will you get to know that someone has hacked your website or blog? It is a common question that is raised when people become webmasters, and their website is prone to get hacked. There are different types of indications that tell the webmasters that a hacker has hacked you. The first indication is that when you see your website and your interface has been changed. Your website does not look like the one you created, and you have no control over it. Some of the hackers deface the website and give a message to the webmasters to know that a particular hacker is hacking them. These are the ways that the hacker enjoys and tells the world proudly I hacked it. Sometimes the webmasters do not get to know that they are being chased, and someone is using their website as well. They do not get any signal about the hacking when the hacker has hacked the site.

Indications

Here are some of the indications and signs that will help the owner of the website know that someone has hacked them, and he has got no control over his property.

• You got to see a defaced website.
• The redirection of the website will lead you to a porn site or some other unsavory website.
• The search engine like Google and Bing will let you know about the hacking.
• The search browsers and engines will give you the indications about website hacking.
• You will find more traffic on your website from other countries that you have not focused yet.
• You will feel strange activities on your website.

How the websites get hacked?

Without the use of some safety measures, hackers hack the websites usually. The webmasters are unaware of the reasons that how someone hacked their property when they have put safety measures as well. The hackers have many ways in which they can get the control of the website, and some of the ways are:

• The hacker easily guesses the password of your website.
• The malware will be introduced in your PC to get the login details.
• Using outdated software other than siteguarding.com
• Hacking some other website that has shared-server with you.

What to do?

When the hacker controls your website, you have the responsibility to take some serious steps. Your website is your property; you cannot lose control over it. The hacker can use your business and information for negative purposes creating problems for you. Follow some of the steps given here when your website is subject to hacking:

1. Tell the World

When the hacker hacks your website, you must tell the world. Other platforms must spread the awareness about the incident. It will help the users to understand the conditions and situations you are facing. It will help the users from facing any problems in the meantime.

2. Contacting the Host

The webmaster must eventually contact the host that can restore website. The server hosts the ability to regain the control over the website you have owned.

• It will come back to normal.
• Remove the redirection to some unsavory website.

3. Damage must be Reverted

Asking for help to regain the website will undo the damage done by the hacker. The people who were aware of your problems can help you get your website back. This step is very important as getting help from someone is essential at particular times.

4. Changing the Passwords

When you get to know that someone hacked the website, change the passwords. Sometimes changing the passwords let you regain the control. Do not ever set easy passwords. Setting the passwords is a technique. So the webmasters must keep changing the passwords or rotate them.

5. Create a Backup

The webmaster must keep the backup of his website. Sometimes, the websites have chances to get hacked because of the popularity or some growing issues. So the backup must be there in case if something happens, you must have your data to upload it again.

6. Website Security

The websites must always be secured. Some of the companies offer their services to set a safe and secure solution for the websites. The websites like siteguarding.com are helpful in such cases when the webmasters want to set security on their websites. The website will offer;

• Antivirus
• Monitoring the Change
• Firewall

7. Find Solutions

The webmasters must look for better solutions to secure their website. They must look for services that guarantee them the proper security. Siteguarding.com is the website that has solutions to your problems.

5 Easy Steps to Secure Your Website from Hackers

You may have worried when starting this post that it would be full of technical jargon that your average website owner would find baffling. Some of our tips further down do get technical, and you may want to bring in your developer for those.

But there are a few things you can do on your own first that don’t involve that much technical know-how.

Step #1: Install security plugins.

If you built your website with a content management system (CMS), you can enhance your website with security plugins that actively prevent website hacking attempts. Each of the main CMS options have security plugins available, many of them for free.

Security plugins for WordPress:

• iThemes Security
• Bulletproof Security
• Sucuri
• Wordfence
• fail2Ban

Security options for Magento:

• Amasty
• Watchlog Pro
• MageFence

Security extensions for Joomla:

• JHackGuard
• jomDefender
• RSFirewall
• Antivirus Website Protection

These options address the security vulnerabilities that are inherent in each platform, foiling additional types of hacking attempts that could threaten your website.

In addition, all websites – whether you’re running a CMS-managed site or HTML pages – can benefit from considering SiteLock.  SiteLock goes above and beyond simply closing site security loopholes by providing daily monitoring for everything from malware detection to vulnerability identification to active virus scanning and more. If your business relies on its website, SiteLock is definitely an investment worth considering.

Step #2: Use HTTPS

As a consumer, you may already know to always look for the green lock image and https in your browser bar any time you provide sensitive information to a website. Those five little letters are an important shorthand for hacker security: they signal that it’s safe to provide financial information on that particular webpage.

An SSL certificate is important because it secures the transfer of information – such as credit cards, personal data, and contact information – between your website and the server.

While an SSL certificate has always been essential for eCommerce websites, having one has recently become important for all websites. Google released a Chrome update in 2018. The security update happened in July and alerts website visitors if your website doesn’t have an SSL certificate installed. That makes visitors more likely to bounce, even if your website doesn’t collect sensitive information.

Search engines are taking website security more seriously than ever because they want users to have a positive and safe experience browsing the web. Taking the commitment to security further, a search engine may rank your website lower in search results if you don’t have an SSL certificate.

What does that mean for you? If you want people to trust your brand, you need to invest in an SSL certificate. The cost of an SSL certificate is minimal, but the extra level of encryption it offers to your customers goes a long way to making your website more secure and trustworthy.

At HostGator, we also take website security seriously, but most importantly, we want to make it easy for you to be secure. All HostGator web hosting packages come with a free SSL certificate. The SSL certificate will be automatically applied to your account, but you do need to take a few steps to install the free SSL certificate on your website.

Step #3: Keep your website platform and software up-to-date

Using a CMS with various useful plugins and extensions offers a lot of benefits, but it also brings risk. The leading cause of website infections is vulnerabilities in a content management system’s extensible components.

Because many of these tools are created as open-source software programs, their code is easily accessible – to both good-intentioned developers as well as malicious hackers. Hackers can pore over this code, looking for security vulnerabilities that allow them to take control of your website by exploiting any platform or script weaknesses.

To protect your website from being hacked, always make sure your content management system, plugins, apps, and any scripts you’ve installed are up-to-date.

If you’re running a website built on WordPress, you can check whether you’re up to date quickly when logging into your WordPress dashboard. Look for the update icon in the top left corner next to your site name. Click the number to access your WordPress Updates.

Step #4: Make sure your passwords are secure

This one seems simple, but it’s so important.

It’s tempting to go with a password you know will always be easy for you to remember. That’s why the #1 most common password is still 123456. You have to do better than that – a lot better than that to prevent login attempts from hackers and other outsiders.

Make the effort to figure out a truly secure password (or use HostGator’s password generator).  Make it long. Use a mix of special characters, numbers, and letters. And steer clear of potentially easy-to-guess keywords like your birthday or kid’s name. If a hacker somehow gains access to other information about you, they’ll know to guess those first.

Holding yourself to a high standard for password security is step one. You also need to make sure everyone who has access to your website has similarly strong passwords. One weak password within your team can make your website susceptible to a data leak, so set expectations with everyone who has access.

Institute requirements for all website users in terms of length and types of characters. If your employees want to use easy passwords for their less secure accounts, that’s their business. But when it comes to your website, it’s your business (literally) and you can hold them to a higher standard.

Step #5: Invest in automatic backups.

Even if you do everything else on this list, you still face some risk. The worst-case scenario of a website hack is to lose everything because you forgot to back your website up. The best way to protect yourself is to make sure you always have a recent backup.

While a data breach will be stressful no matter what, when you have a current backup, recovering is much easier. You can make a habit out of manually backing your website up daily or weekly. But if there’s even the slightest chance you’ll forget, invest in automatic backups. It’s a cheap way to buy peace of mind.