A hacked website is one of the most frustrating situations a business owner can face. The negative impacts can be widespread, depending on the level of hacking, the level of activity the site accommodates, and how quickly an action plan is put in place.
Negative impacts of a hacked website include:
Website Downtime
A hacked website may go offline, or be slowed down by malicious activities, causing disruption to your business. This downtime can result in lost traffic and sales, particularly if the website is a major revenue source.
Security Risks
Hackers can steal sensitive data from your users, such as personal information, passwords, even credit card numbers. This can lead to identity theft or financial fraud. A hacked site can be used to spread malware to visitors’ devices, potentially infecting their computers with viruses, ransomware, or spyware. Cybercriminals may use your website to launch phishing attacks, tricking visitors into revealing their login credentials or financial information.
SEO and Traffic Consequences
Google and other search engines may penalise or your website if they discover it is compromised – especially if it’s deeply infected or at risk for too long. This could result in your website being removed from search results or ranked lower, hurting your SEO and leading to a significant loss of organic traffic.
Financial Losses
Recovering from a hack can be expensive. It may involve hiring cybersecurity experts, paying for new software, restoring backups, and potentially dealing with legal fees or regulatory fines. Cleaning up a hacked website can be time-consuming and complicated. Depending on the severity of the hack, you may need to rebuild parts of the site or restore it from a clean backup.
Reputation Damage
If visitors or customers find out your website has been hacked, they may lose trust in your ability to secure their data. This can damage your brand’s reputation, especially if sensitive information is compromised. Customers who no longer feel safe on your site may avoid returning, or worse, leave negative reviews, which can harm your business.
How Can I Prevent My Website from Getting Hacked?
It’s almost impossible to eliminate the risk of getting your website hacked, but there are ways to significantly reduce the likelihood of it happening. They involve a combination of proactive security measures, regular maintenance, and staying vigilant.
Keep Software and Plugins Updated
Ensure your website’s CMS (like WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal) and any plugins, themes, or extensions are updated regularly. Updates often contain security patches that fix vulnerabilities. Delete any plugins or themes that you are not using, as these can also be potential entry points for hackers if left outdated.
Use Strong, Unique Passwords
Never use default admin usernames or passwords. Use complex passwords that include a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters. Periodically update your passwords, especially for admin accounts, database access, FTP, and hosting accounts.
Use SSL/TLS Encryption
Ensure your website uses HTTPS by installing an SSL certificate. This encrypts the data transferred between your website and your visitors, protecting sensitive information.
Implement a Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Web Application Firewall (WAF) sits between your website and visitors, filtering out malicious traffic and attacks such as SQL injections, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other exploits before they reach your site.
Regular Backups
This won’t reduce the likelihood of a hacking attack, but having a recent copy of your website (including its files and databases) will allow your IT support to quickly restore the website, if needed.
Limit User Access and Permissions
Give admin-level access only to trusted users who need it. For others, assign appropriate user roles with limited access.
Secure Your Hosting Environment
Use a reliable hosting provider that offers security features such as malware scanning, DDoS protection, and secure server configurations. Set up server-level firewalls and configure them to block unauthorized access attempts.
Invest in a Website Care Plan
A Website Care Plan ensures that your software is updated regularly and has other features such as malware scanning, firewalls and uptime monitoring.
Monitor Your Website for Suspicious Activity
Use monitoring tools to set up alerts for any changes to critical files, user login activity, or other unusual actions on your site. Creating a Google Search Console account for the website will allow you to receive alerts about any security issues or penalties related to your site.
Actions To Take if your Website Gets Hacked
If you’re not an expert in this field, you should be contacting your web developer, website manager, or other similar party who oversees the running of your website. They will be able to look into things for you, or put you in touch with the right people.
There is no way to determine how long it will take to clean a site, or know what’s involved until digging deeper. Sometimes it’s as simple as backing the site up and letting WordFence auto clean up a file. Other times it can take 5-10 hours or even more. It all depends on the severity of the hack, and in worst case scenarios it can take a few weeks. This for major hacks where websites that are breached can have have backdoors littered throughout the Database and WP files and requires monitoring, reporting, and analysing changes made by the malicious code to track down the breach and clean over the course of days of weeks.
Here is what we typically do when a client contacts us about a hacked website:
1. Take a manual backup of entire site (if site is accessible and not completely down)
2. Install + activate WordFence firewall
3. Site Scan using WordFence + Sucuri + Google safe browse
4. Clean up of malicious code found in files + DB
5. Update any plugins + themes that have vulnerabilities flagged
6. Install WP Activity log for monitoring site changes via dashboard
7. Provide a list of all WP Admin and editor users and identify only the necessary users required
8. Remove all WP users provided by client + and identified as false accounts
9. Require ALL user passwords to be updated via WP password reset emails sent to user accounts
10. Update the Database password in phpMyAdmin
11. Update DB password in WP core files
12. Update Hosting server password
13. Update Hosting Account password
14. Rescan site to ensure site is clean
If you’re on a Care Plan it’s likely you will already have a firewall in place and plugins that are fully up to date (at least within the last month). This will reduce some steps in our process, likely reducing the time involved to fix the hack, as well as the severity of the attack.
The Care Plan doesn’t cover you for fixing a hacked website, but will likely reduce the costs due to the optimal security practices already in place. If you have allocated hours for support in your plan, this can sometimes be enough to cover the clean up.
For websites that aren’t on a care plan, a base fee of around $1000 is normal to investigate the issue and to provide a fix. This fee will cover the initial cleanse and a grace period of 1 week, as several pieces of software are installed during clean up to monitor the site after a cleanse and if another breach is detected we use that data to begin cleaning infected files sources.
If the site is already infected, in some scenarios depending on the level of the malicious code found (and if it has spread to the database) it can take several weeks of monitoring and cleansing to identify all backdoors that may be in the Database + the WP Files.
Fingers crossed you never have to apply any of this information. But if you do, feel free to reach out if you need assistance.
