Semalt Explains How To Recover Your Site After Malicious Attack

23.05.2018

Semalt Explains How To Recover Your Site After Malicious Attack

The most demotivating experience for a site owner is malicious attacks of their webs. In this situation, developers are encouraged to stay calm and appropriately execute correct measures. Frank Abagnale, the Semalt Senior Customer Success Manager, provides steps of systematically recovering a hacked site. Let's go!

Foremost, check your computer for any viruses. This is a preparatory step that helps to exclude the possibility of having your computer as the source of attack before commencing to recover the site. On this note, thus, scanning your local computer for infections, malware or viruses should be the initial step. An example of recommended virus scanner is EU-Cleaner from AntiBotnet consulting center, Germany. The initiative helps a site developer to delete any malware for free. Additionally, this consulting center instantly sends ticket number and contact data via email to a website owner in case of hacked site.

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23.05.2018

Secondly, any admin passwords should be changed. It is a step that ensures hackers can no longer access your database, website or web space. Passwords can be managed from web hosting service customer area and admin section of a site. Additionally, password protection can be enhanced by accessing web space via means of safety protocols such as Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), changing passwords in other services and choosing the most secure passwords. Default terms should never be used as admin passwords for web security.

Thirdly, use phpMyAdmin to reset website admin password. If a site owner is unable to sign in into the admin section of their site, the hackers might have changed password or deactivated the account. In this scenario, the passwords in the databases must be changed. This can be achieved by the use of phpMyAdmin for developers using WordPress.

Damage should be assessed in the next step of recovering a hacked site. It entails evaluating the situation and planning on how to proceed. Determine the infected les, any compromise on the sensitive data, and access to the database and if other sites on your web server are affected. The procedure can be executed by use of Google Webmaster Tools.

Next, restore the backup and check for malware. In this step, a site owner should replace any affected les with an uninfected backup of les. Additionally, the database should be restored from backup if the possibility that hackers accessed to the database cannot be excluded. Just remember, two important backups are Joomla and WordPress.

Update themes, plugins, extensions and applications. Hackers often use security holes in extensions, plugin, and themes. Thus, as soon as the backups have been restored, all known security holes must be closed by updating all themes, extensions, and applications. Each of the plugins affects the security of a site.

Finally, work to remove the site from blacklists. Yahoo, Google, and Bing maintain blacklists for sites infected with viruses. Any site placed on Google blacklist, for instance, is punished with a lower ranking or even removed from the search index. Thus, after importing clean backups and changing passwords, notify search engines to get removed from blacklists.

In conclusion, attacks on sites are part of the modern online world. If a site is hacked, developers might feel shocked.

At this time, it is important to remain calm since you now know what to do and effectively recover a website.

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