Your Website Got Hacked. Now What?

You get to work, take a glance at your website, and get that sinking feeling in your stomach. You see a front page full of gibberish, images, altered scripts or nothing at all. Regardless of the way that the hacking occurs, it’s time to go into disaster recovery mode to get yourself all fixed up.

Fix the Root Issue

First things first. Make sure you secure your server in such a way that you aren’t leaving the loophole open for the hacker to get right back in to your website. If you’re using web hosting services with managed hosting, talk to support and get them to take care of any potential issues. Some of the main things that you need to check if you’re doing your own server support are security upgrades to the operating system, updates to all scripts that you’re using, wiping out malicious code injections in the coding of your website and any tables in databases, and changing passwords.

If a hacker got your server password information via keyloggers, trojans or another method from your own computer, you also need to secure those systems. It’s possible they left malicious viruses behind on your computer, so you may need to look into disaster recovery solutions such as the Advanced Outlook Recovery in case essential business communication got wiped out or corrupted.

Going Into Recovery Mode

Now that you’ve battened down the hatches, you need to work on getting everything back to normal. With any luck, this is as simple as restoring backups that were taken before the hacking. However, you need to make sure the backups don’t have malicious code or loopholes that will be reintroduced. Otherwise, you’re just going to end up in a never-ending cycle of hacking doom that your customers probably won’t appreciate.

Preventing Future Attacks

Once you’ve gotten back up and running, it’s time to stop this from ever happening again. Prevention is the name of the game, and an ounce of it is going to save you days of headaches. First, if you had to recover with a method other than properly working backups, you need to get moving on a backup system that works for you. Maybe it’s just a redundant drive, maybe it’s an off-site server, maybe you want to try out cloud backup solutions. No matter what you pick, go for something that’s going to leave you with the least amount of recovery work if things go horribly wrong again. Make sure to test your backups as well. There’s nothing worse than having all sorts of backup solutions and none of them actually working.

You also need to keep on top of the security updates and script updates for your server and your client computers. A security hole in any of your systems leaves you at risk. While you can’t mitigate every attack vector, you can make the hackers have to work for it.You get to work, take a glance at your website, and get that sinking feeling in your stomach. You see a front page full of gibberish, images, altered scripts or nothing at all. Regardless of the way that the hacking occurs, it’s time to go into disaster recovery mode to get yourself all fixed up.