Today we will discuss how to know if your website is already attacked by hackers. It’s a very sensitive moment for everyone – to learn that their site has been hacked. Given the number of automated hacking tools in circulation. It’s not surprising that there are no more sites that are victims of this fate. If you are wondering if your site has been hacked, read on to learn about some common signs and symptoms and how you can be sure that you have been hacked.
Website Hacked Sign
Unexpected list when spot-checking search results
It is a prudent practice for site owners to take a few minutes regularly to spot-check how their site looks in search results. An automatic ranking-checker is a great way to stay at the top of the pages that go up or down in the rankings, but there is much more.
It’s a good idea to spend a few minutes regularly visiting Google and typing the following into the search box: site: oudel.com (replacing Oudel.com with your own domain).
Pop the site into Google Safe Browsing and see if it reveals anything (replace it with your own domain again): transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search?url=knownhost.com
You will get an alert notice from the google search console.
Google warns you
There are plenty of reasons to sign-up in Google Search Console, where you can log in and check out the Security Issues section of your dashboard to find instance URLs that Google has flagged as being hacked. Email alerts mean you don’t have to log in often.
Cloaking – where users of different sites see different content. This is often done to serve hacked content on Google but to serve general content to human visitors so that Google search results show hacked page titles and meta descriptions.
Diagnosis:
Problems reported by Google include checking the URLs in the alerts and the Security Problems section of the search console, as well as looking for issues using the Search Console URL Inspection Tool (even when you don’t see them in your own browser).
Important Notes:
- Don’t ignore warnings after seeing the URLs reported by Google and seeing no problem, as hackers often use cloaking techniques.
- Google is not the only search engine that is targeted or offers tools for managing issues – Bing Webmaster Tools is another place to sign up.
The web hosting company warns you
- It’s not a good idea to get a warning that your web hosting account has run out of resources, especially when you later see that it’s not because of the slashdot effect.
- Regularly logging into cPanel and tracking your resource costs on the dashboard homepage will give you a chance to notice the issues before you become an account-buster!
If you have multiple domains in your account, log in to cPanel and check the metrics → bandwidth to find out which one is using the most, then check the metrics > visitors and select that domain report. If you only have one domain, go directly to Metrics > Visitors and select Report.
Complain about email not being available
Email spam is just as much a threat as web pages and both are part of your online presence.
When domain or IP addresses are reported to send spam, real-time spam blacklists can flag a sender, causing companies, network providers, and Internet service providers to stop receiving emails from intended recipients. A blacklist is determined by who and how reported spam.
The key is to find out if you are on a blacklist so that you can stop spam and notify blacklists that you have resolved the issue. UltraToolbox and MxToolbox are free online tools that let you check multiple blacklists together. The links to both are in the Handy Tools section below
The website stops responding
Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks can simultaneously cripple a website by flooding requests starting from different devices. Sites may freeze, go offline, and be open to compromise. If your site doesn’t respond and you can’t log in to check resources and logs, contact Oudel support immediately. You should be serious about DDoS attacks very seriously. Be sure to check out the guide above on how to know if this is a DDoS attack.
Website page redirected unexpectedly
When people trust a website for a long, successful relationship, they can probably click on links to the whole site without having to think twice about them. Hackers expect to capitalize on this when changing the links on the site so that they point to certain ads, spam, malware, or other unsafe destinations. Regular crawling of your website can help you detect broken links (internal and external), 404 pages, and bad redirects.
When you look at analytics like Google Analytics and see that page time and other metrics are very different from a week, month, or year ago.
Hacker says you have been hacked
In a high percentage of cases, this is not true at all, but rather an attempt to extort money from you through social engineering. If you see that you can’t access your email. This is probably not a scam if you see password reset notifications or unexpected emails in your sent folder.
We should use
Two-factor authentication must-have technology like unique, strong passwords.
On the other side of the coin, ransomware has gone wild in the last few years. Companies large and small are suffering from data theft or lockout from their systems. Including claims for payment to unlock them (or return data).
More things you can do
Check for leaked hacked site data
It is entirely possible that some of your data have been stolen by hackers. Who has accessed the databases of the sites you use. Some of these violations have occurred on huge sites like Dropbox, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Adobe, Trillion, Bitcoin Talk, and many more.
One way to use the same password on multiple sites is for hackers to use leaked login details. For additional hacking of someone’s online presence. If your initial email is compromised, hackers can reset passwords on many sites, increasing their impact quickly.
If you use the same password for your hosting account’s admin page, cPanel, database, or another complex system. That is very unsafe and high risk.
CSF/LFD
Integration Detection and Login Activity Monitoring with a Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) Firewall, the integration of the Login Failure Daemon (LFD) with ConfigServer Security & Firewall (CSF) is more than just monitoring and alerting.
LFD detects loads of attackers’ automatic IP blocking, login brute force attempts, port scanners, and more. This is a great open-source security system for VPS users.
Handy Tools
- Check Google Hacked Sites Troubleshooter Regularly – support.google.com/webmasters/troubleshooter/6155978?hl=en
- Must Check Google Search Console Security Issues Regularly – search.google.com/search-console/security-issues
- Check Google Safe Browsing Transparency Report Regularly – transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search
- IsItHacked Multi-Hack Checker isithacked.com
- MxToolbox Blacklist Checker – mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
- Sucuri SiteCheck – sitecheck.sucuri.net/
- MxToolBox Blacklist Check – mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
