Steps to Fix a Hacked Website – Is your company’s website making it easier for hackers to spread malware and plan data breaches and cyber-attacks? According to Dubai Website Design data, 30,000 websites are discovered to be distributing malware on average each day. Most of these websites are compromised by taking advantage of unpatched weaknesses, which are then leveraged to spread malware.
Any business owner who wants to avoid joining the virus distribution chain must have a controlled, intelligent, and comprehensive web application security solution. But understanding what to do if your website gets hacked is just as crucial. You may learn more about it in-depth from this article.
How to Fix a Hacked Website
Please take action to fix your website as soon as you are confident that it has been compromised. You can restore and improve your hacked website by using the following methods as a reference.
Don’t Panic, and Maintain Your Composure
There’s no need to freak out; you can effectively fix a hacked website that has been compromised earlier. An emotional response could do more harm than help without adequately assessing the problem.
Keep your composure and move on to the following action.
Alter Your Passwords and Check Your Access
One of the most frequent types of cyber security risks is brute-force assaults. Hackers try various letter and number combinations to decipher the admin account’s password. By changing every password, you may deny hackers access to your website and stop them from breaking into other accounts and doing additional harm.
The experts advise you to examine website user access privileges in addition to resetting all of your passwords. Hackers will have complete access to all administration functions if they successfully break into the website using an admin account.
Check the user roles and permissions if WordPress powers the compromised website by going to Users in the admin dashboard. Examine accounts with super admin and admin credentials, as they have the highest access privileges.
Apply the same process to platforms that allow multiple users access, including your hosting control panel and FTP account.
Using the File Manager of your web host, change the permissions of your website’s files, especially those in the root directory (public HTML), such as the wp-admin folder and wp-config.php file. This way, unauthorised individuals won’t access, modify, or execute existing files.
Make A Copy of Your Website as A Backup
Although your website may have been compromised, it is still operational and contains all the necessary information. If the clean-up procedure fails the first time, you can retry it by downloading a website backup and uploading a new version of the website.
Track Your Steps Back
Most hacking attempts occur after a website goes through some updates that introduce new vulnerabilities. You should be able to locate the cause of the security issues much more quickly by going back and looking at your previous actions.
Checking your weblogs for a sudden increase in traffic will help you narrow the window of opportunity. Then, check your hosting control panel’s access and error logs for any strange activity or errors during the suspected period.
Examine Online Recent Breaches
Security flaws can affect even widely used applications. Keeping up with cyber security news can make it much easier for you to identify vulnerabilities and get destructive malware off your website before it can do damage.
Speak With Your Hosting Company
If your compromised website uses shared hosting, the security problems may have been caused by another website using the same shared server. Cyberattacks in this situation can also target your hosting account.
Get in touch with your hosting provider to find out if the other websites on the same server have also been targeted.
Most web servers also give users access to weblogs, enabling you to keep track of website visitors. If server access logging is default disabled, speak with your hosting company or turn it on yourself.
As a reminder, choose a safe web hosting to guard against hacking occurrences on your website.
Refresh Your .Htaccess File
High-level configuration configurations for a website hosted on the Apache Web Server are contained in the file .htaccess. Because of this, .htaccess is frequently the subject of online attacks.
Endnote
Reputation engines like Google can seriously harm your company if they flag your website as “malicious.” Being hacked is expensive and requires a lot of work to recover from. No matter how big or small your organisation is, it would be best to take the necessary precautions to protect online applications from hackers.
This is where you should bring in Dubai Website Design to take a proactive approach. They will help you to assess the risk and promptly mitigate it continuously.