Website Hacked

Steps to take with your hacked site. What to do.

Having a website hacked in most instances is a frustrating inconvenience.

Unfortunately, we live in a day and age where hacked websites are prevelant. Don’t fear, we will get you on the right track and help fix your hacked website today!

Reset Passwords

First off, make sure you have access to your website hosting. In particular CPANEL (sometimes known as console) access. This is where all the files live for your website. Next, make sure you have WordPress administrator access too.

Most articles you read about site hackes will tell you to change the password. This is probably not a bad idea. However, check your WordPress username. If your username is something generic like “admin” or “user” I highly recommend changing the username to something not so easy to guess (and please don’t use your site name!).

To do this, log into WordPress dashboard and create a new username with administrator access. Make sure you use the auto generated password from WordPress, not something that’s easy to guess. Once you’ve created your new user, log in as that user and you’ll be able to delete the old “admin” user. After you click delete, make sure you assign all the posts to the new user you just created.

Check if your website has been hacked

There are quite a few website scanning tools out there. If you want a thorough check, please go to the My Site Got Hacked home page and enter your URL and email, and I would be happy to do the scan for you.

However, if you want to do this yourself, it’s pretty easy.

Sucuri Website Scan

Head over to sitecheck.sucuri.net. Enter in your URL. This scans your website and will pop up with a bright red warning. There are times a warning won’t appear and you still have a feeling that your site has been hacked. The Sucuri scan isn’t full proof, as it can only scan from the outside, it obviously doesn’t have access to your server.

Virus Scan Total

I use the VirusTotal team to scan websites, as well as Sucuri. This scan aggregates external scanning tools and gives a malware rating. For a little more technical insight they have a details tab which can give great insight into the server that’s running behind the scenes.

Sucuri WordPress Plugin

The team at Sucuri have put together a pretty good WordPress Security Plugin which i highly recommend. If you head over to your WordPress site, and install the plugin, then head to the Sucuri dashboard, it will automatically scan your site, and identify where the Malware is.

WordFence WordPress Plugin

The WordFence WordPress plugin is a great tool. Similar to Sucuri, it can do a scan of comprimised files. From the dashboard, you are able to either delete or repair files. WordFence also has a premium subscription.

What to do now that your website is hacked

OK. So we know the website has been hacked and we’ve used all our tools to identify where the problem lies. From here you either hand the clean-up over to someone who does this work, or attempt it yourself.

My preference is to go through the infected files and remove usually injected code. This can be lines of Javascript injected into JS files, random lines of PHP in the functions.php file, header.php, footer.php files.

Once you’ve identified where these issues are, also double check that there aren’t any random files throughout the site. You’ll need to check the WP-Admin, WP-Includes, WP-Content folders. Sometimes the index.php file in these folders are compromised and can be where the root cause is.

Lastly, I always regenerate a new .htaccess file, and double check the WP-Config.php file hasn’t been comprised.

Why Choose My Site Got Hacked to fix your hacked website

We’ve had over 10 years experience working with WordPress, and we understand that WordPress can come in different shapes and sizes. With our experience we’ve seen it all. From comprimised files to compromised databases. We handle every case personally and don’t use automated software to remove the malware.

There are a lot of tools out there that offer malware removal service but they seem to use the automated scripts. What this means is they may remove the malware, but they don’t necessarily get to the root cause and take a proactive approach.

Here at MySiteGotHacked we will get in touch with you to solve the provlem quickly and efficiently and offer recommendations to prevent any future attacks. This may include moving hosting providers, a website audit to determine whether to replace vulnrable plugins.

We can also set you up with free Firewall service such as CloudFlare.

Get in touch with us today, for a no obligation chat. We want to see you up and running as quickly as possible.

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