Hacked Websites

I stated at a network meeting that I had fixed only one hacked website this year. However, by 5 pm that day, I had resolved two. Hacking incidents occur for various reasons; large websites experience breaches to access personal data, while others are infiltrated with malicious code redirecting visitors to spammy websites, phishing pages, or hacker-controlled domains. Additionally, web servers may be compromised to enable spammers to exploit email servers for global spam distribution.

Why Is This Significant?

1. It can tarnish your company's brand image and reputation.
2. It may result in significant traffic loss as visitors are redirected elsewhere.
3. Reduced traffic can lead to decreased sales, affecting your revenue.
4. The websites visitors are redirected to might promote illegal commodities, potentially entangling your website in legal issues.
5. Visitors could contract viruses from the redirected websites and hold you accountable, publicly or directly through social media.
6. Your website's IP address could be blacklisted, leading to exclusion from search engine results or at least displaying a warning about potential hacking in search results.

How Can You Prevent Website Hacking?

While it's not possible to achieve 100% prevention due to the persistent nature of security threats, you can take measures to reduce the risk and deter hackers:

1. Keep your Content Management System (CMS), core code, plugins, and modules up to date.
2. Enforce strong password policies and consider implementing two-factor authentication.
3. Utilize security plugins and web application firewalls to monitor and filter incoming traffic.
4. Regularly assess and improve your website's security measures.
5. Stay vigilant for abandoned or outdated plugins and replace them with maintained alternatives.

Our WordPress Priority Maintenance packages have options to have security software installed that monitors the plugins and warning if there are any known vulnerabilities or if the plugin has been abandoned.

If your website is hacked, what can you do?

Pop over to Let’s Talk and book a one-to-one Zoom session or give us a call on 01733 270872 to discover more.