Even if you think you are doing everything right, there is always a chance your site will be hacked. If an attacker gains control of your website it can do a lot of damage to your site visitors, being blacklisted, hurt your SEO rankings, damage your brand and reputation, and even your business revenue.
There are several things you can do to improve your odds of quickly detecting a hack:
- Visit your website frequently – It seems obvious, but as the website owner you are much more likely than someone else to spot something that doesn’t look right.
- Search for your website regularly – Some hacked websites look perfectly normal to a regular user while serving up spam and other malicious content to search engines. By searching for your website you should be able to catch SEO spam even if an attacker is trying to hide it from you. Also, click the links in your search results to make sure the search engine link directs where it should, and not a bad online neighborhood.
- Set up email alerts in Google Search Console – Google is constantly crawling your website and will alert you if problems are detected, including the presence of malware.
- Use a security scanner and set up email alerts – Scanners check WordPress core files, themes and plugins for malware, bad URLs, backdoors, SEO spam, malicious redirects and code injections. It also compares the files on your site with those in the WordPress.org repository, checking their integrity and reporting any changes to you. With Premium security systems, you can be scheduled to scan more often and at optimum times, leverages real-time malware signature updates, performs blacklist checks, and more.
- Your website visitors are often the first to identify an issue with your website – Make sure that it is easy for them to contact you and that you investigate their reports immediately.
- Watch for unexplained spikes in traffic – If an attacker is using your website to host malicious content, they are likely going to drive traffic to it. An unexplained increase in website traffic may indicate a hacked site.
We hope you never get hacked, but if you de, we hope these tips will help you to detect and deal with a hacked website quickly. If you are a Conceptualized Design customer, you have a security team behind you to help you when you need it.
Source of information: Wordfence Blog
