web development india, Website Design

Being prepared – When your websites is hacked.

Rushik Shah User Icon By: Rushik Shah

Securing your hacked wordpress site

 

Websites are often infected with Malware which by means is good for business. Malware will cause for warning to appear on your website when it is loaded and at times it is also affect the SEO ranking of your website. In fact many browsers will refuse to open it in the first place.

Hence it is always necessary to take preventive measures and prevent your website  from being hacked. It may not be possible to make a website completely hack proof however there are steps you can take to make the job of hacking your website a bit harder.

WordPress website are quite vulnerable and in recent time many websites using WordPress have been hacked. Thus in spite of the precautions, if your website is still hacked there are a simple disaster recovery plan for you to follow:

Evaluating the significance of the website modules

  • WordPress is a group of components and these components work together to form you website. Thus the first thing to do when your website is hacked to list the most important sections of your website from the business success perspective. Another way of putting it look for the important sections (or business logic) that can keep you website afloat.
  • As an example we will consider you have an ecommerce module, WooCommerce installed on your WordPress website and your website has been hacked. If after the hack you find that the ecommerce plugin WooCommerce has been hacked into and the only possible solution is to restore the website from the backup taken 24 hours ago. This is likely to man loss of data if you have had new customers and orders in the last 24 hours. In this case it is advisable for you to first take a backup of the broken website (hacked website) and store in a good place to access later. On the other hand if you have only added a few images to the gallery in the last 24 hours it may be a good idea to allow a complete restore and go back 24 hours.

Where to look for help

  • It is a good idea to store a few contact information details, especially those of your web hosting company and the web developer as well. This is because in the remote case that your website is hacked and you are not a very IT savvy person, these are the two people who have the ability to restore your website the way it was again.
  • Your Web Hosting provider is in control of the main sever and thus can run quick scans and inform you where the potentially dangerous files are located. This can make the process of cleaning you website much quicker at times.
  • In addition to that, the Web Hosting provider can also restore your website from a backup. Thus it is also a good idea to check how good your hosting company is prior to selecting. At the same time the person that developed your website will have a fair idea of how to restore it as well. Thus if you have chosen a trusted developer; you might just be in luck if the developer is able to restore the website, by putting back together the individual modules.

Having a plan for when this does happen:  

  •  As long as your website is on the Internet it is always vulnerable; no matter what security precautions you are talking. Thus it is in your interest to design a disaster recovery plan. The correct way of going about designing a disaster recovery plan is to make sure keep it as simple as possible and make sure the process is simple, quick yet effective.

An outline of a recovery plan: 

Here are few basic steps to help you develop your recovery plan when your WordPress website does get hacked.

Stay Calm:

It is likely that you find out your website is hacked when you try to load it and instead you get a message from hacking group or your main page is defaced. At times it may be via Google or one of your customers or friends letting your know that your website has been affected. The important thing here is to stay calm. Since the website is already hacked; there is little that can be done immediately.

Back up First: 

It is vital that you take a complete backup of your website that has been hacked and that includes all the log files and the database of your website. This step is important because the log files often contain vital information about what went wrong and how the website was hacked. At the same time the website files and database of the hacked website will show you where the loop hole exist that made your website vulnerable.

Take the website offline:

There is nothing worse than a customer visiting a hacked website. Hence it is a good idea to take the hacked website offline as soon as possible and place it in maintenance mode; with appropriate banners.

Restore the Website:

You now have the option of restoring the website from a previous backup or removing and correcting the malicious code. It is easy to simply delete everything and restore from backup; however that may result in loss of data.

Ready to restart: 

One your website is fixed it is a good idea to take some time in assessing what went wrong and how it is the website was accessed by an unauthorised person before going back online. This can be done by checking the log files for one.

How Alakmalak delivers good quality at a good cost:

Alakmalak is one firm that has been around since a long time. It is a well-established web development company and is successful. It has had the good fortune of developing more than 2000 websites for clients from all around the world and is still going strong. This is one firm you can trust with your website.

  • wordpress websites hacked

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