Hacking your website is a large deal and cleaning it up can be quite complicated. But here are the high-level steps you and/or your support team should take once you discover that you’ve been hacked. Here are 5 critical steps to take if your website is hacked.
5 Critical steps to be taken: Website hacked
1. Stay calm
First and foremost, remain calm. You can recover from it.
2. Call in your support team
If you don’t have the correct technical knowledge of employees, calling in a support team will be your best choice. Ideally, this will be someone with powerful technical skills as well as someone who is acquainted with your site and its setup. This may include your Internet developer and/or hosting provider.
Without a programming and technical background, web developers may have a harder time evaluating and fixing the problem. Experienced web developers (e.g. programmers) should have the required abilities to evaluate and solve the issue. Many hosting companies will not do the real job of cleaning up your website. But they can provide invaluable help or have other clients experiencing the same problem.
3. Pull together the data your support team will need to get your data together for your team.
Your developer/team will need access to CMS Login: your administrative / super-admin content management system Hosting Login: your hosting control panel to access your database and weblogs your internet logs: both access logs and error logs. Be sure that the Internet logs are provided by your hosting business.
Most Internet servers do, but some hosting businesses do not switch those on by default or may not provide access to them. FTP / sFTP access credentials should include the host name, username, and password Backups: any backups you may have. You should consider maintaining this data together in a secure place that you can rapidly access should the need ever occur.
4. Take your website offline
You should momentarily shut down the site while it is being evaluated and corrected. Your hosting control panel may be able to momentarily switch off your site. Or you may need to safeguard your website’s primary directory password to prevent visitors from accessing your site while the team is working on fixing it. To find out more about whether this article has been hacked on your website check this out How To Know If Your Website is Hacked and What To Do?
5. Scan your local virus and malware devices
You’ll want to scan your local computer(s) with your anti-virus software to make sure they’re not infected with malware, spyware, trojans, etc. Be sure that your anti-virus software is up-to-date before using it to scan your computer.
Hacking your website is no fun. But you can recover from it. So remain calm and call the correct support team to get it corrected and run again. While we’ve just skimmed the process surface required to clean the site, having the correct support team in location can make a large difference.
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