Signs your website has been hacked

Such attacks are targeted and are caused due to security vulnerabilities in your e-Commerce store. Hackers are known to use malware on hacked websites to send spam emails to a huge number of people. As a result, even legitimate emails being sent by you end up in the spam folder. If you notice any strange looking, obfuscated, or cryptic looking JavaScript code in the web page source, quickly comment it out. It may be used to steal passwords, credit card information or other sensitive customer information.

It can also be used to redirect your visitors to other malicious website, pop-ups, advertisements etc. Our security researchers recently found malicious jQuery code in a huge number of hacked Magento Stores. This tiny code snippet sends credit card information to malicious servers on the Checkout page.

If you notice that your website has suddenly become very slow and shows error messages, it is likely that malware is utilizing your server resources. Most targeted pages are the checkout, payment, login and signup pages. Often you will find unexpected messages in the error logs about deprecated functions, undefined offsets, connection denied or other errors.

If the file path or error looks unfamiliar, verify the authenticity of the code or run a malware scan. Some of the most common error messages are:. If you find new admin users, database users, FTP users it is a strong sign that you are hacked.

Privileged accounts are left behind by hackers to continue having access to your website and server. Such accounts are used to backdoor your website and access if whenever they wish to. If you notice core system files being recently modified, compare the files to earlier versions to find what has changed.

An attacker could have modifies the files to run malicious code, send spam emails or create back-doors to your website. If there are files with suspicious looking filenames, server-side scripts. If your website visitors see spam advertisements or popups, your website is likely to be compromised due to Cross-site Scripting XSS or malicious code injection.

Hackers earn money from ad impressions. Google safe browsing team will send you a mail that they have detected social engineering content on your website.

Again a sign of Cross-site Scripting or Server-side code manipulation where a hacker is able to redirect your web traffic to phishing pages, compromised websites or even competitor websites. Also known as Google Webmaster, the Google Search Console will notify you about your website being hacked through email.

Additionally, this notification email will also contain valuable information about the attack including suspicious URLs — along with recommended steps on how to fix the problem. WordPress web hosting companies do regularly scan their web or hosting server for any malicious code.

When they detect any such code, they suspend the hosted website to stop the infection from spreading to other hosted sites. Apart from malware code, web hosts may suspend your website for a variety of reasons including it being blacklisted by Google or your web server sending out spam or phishing emails.

Hackers often use data breaches or phishing to collect your customer records including credit card numbers. If your customer support team is receiving large volumes of customers complaining about not being able to log in to their accounts or receiving suspicious phishing emails from your account, chances are high that your website has been hacked.

Hackers also deploy Denial-of-Service or DoS attacks to overload your server resources, thus impacting your website speed and performance. They do this by sending massive volumes of website requests to your server from fake IP addresses.

This effectively overburdens your server, thus slowing it down significantly. If your website is taking an unusually high time over 10 seconds to load on any device, it is likely to be infected with malware. Incoming traffic to your website being redirected to other websites is one of the signs that your website has been hacked.

Hackers often deploy cross-site scripting or XSS attacks to send your website traffic to unsolicited websites selling counterfeit or illegal products. However, you can make a mistake, so endeavor to cross-check your login details.

In fact, if your origin login credentials is invalid after several attempts, then your website has been hacked. Most hackers carry out cross-scripting hacks. Rather than seeing your web pages when you launch their URL, you are redirected to another site. This new site can be theirs, an advert site, or a parody site. Web hosting companies do have specific security policies and tools that check the security state of websites on their server.

If a hack is suspected on a particular site, it is likely to be taken offline. This prevents hackers from injecting other websites hosted on the same servers.

In such a case, you are likely to be notified by your web host. When you start getting unusual traffic from odd websites, you should be wary as it may be a DDoS attack on your website.

Not to mention, hackers can also send loads of traffic using bots to steal your data. A website scan is the best way to check whether your site has been hacked or not. Privileged accounts are left behind by hackers to continue having access to your website and server. Such accounts are used to backdoor your website and access if whenever they wish to.

If you notice core system files being recently modified, compare the files to earlier versions to find what has changed. An attacker could have modifies the files to run malicious code, send spam emails or create back-doors to your website. If there are files with suspicious looking filenames, server-side scripts.

If your website visitors see spam advertisements or popups, your website is likely to be compromised due to malicious code injection. Hackers earn money from ad impressions and what better way to get more impressions than by sneaking their ads onto unsuspecting sites.

In some cases these sneaky hackers will re-direct your site to a completely different site, and often, an x-rated site. If this is the case they may have placed a redirect code in your files. Hopefully you're using some type of analytics to track and monitor your site's visitors because if you are, you'll be able to notice sudden traffic spikes. Spam emails are sent from your server with links to existing or new pages that are created by the hacker. A hacked website can be caused by a variety of factors such as vulnerable hosting situations, outdated plugins, and weak login credentials to name a few.

It can be difficult spending hours learning how to back up your site, dealing with a hacked server, or figuring out why your website is down.

Updates are critical to the health and longevity of your site, and the easiest way to keep your site secure is to keep it updated. At K-Designs, we offer a simple, cost-effective way to protect your website. Our Website Care Packages are ideal for web owners that don't have the time or expertise to adequately protect their websites against security vulnerabilities.

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