In the world of security the following tips are golden: keep your templates and plugins up to date; use secure passwords and captchas; be careful with who and what you give access to; use a web host that is security conscious.
With the increase of the user base and developing of reputation, the chance of being hacked increases as well, and the chances it can happen to anyone are high. That is why the best thing to do is to have a recovery plan after a hack. If such a problem occurs, you will know exactly what to do. Check out all the items we offer. This will keep you safe in case of an emergency.
Be the first to know about a hack
You do not want to find out about a hack when you accidentally visit a site, do you? The worst thing about accidentally finding a hack is that you probably will not know how long ago it happened. And you will not be able to assess the damage in perspective.
The solution is to set up one or a few proactive tools that detect hacks and notify you.
Take for example Front End/Source Code Monitors. There are tools that monitor the website uptime and content changes. There are also tools that monitor the site's source code for hacks. Both options can be configured to send different notifications.
Google Search Console Alerts helps detect multiple hacks. Set up your website and make sure email alerts are enabled in the settings.
Take care of a backup
You will need a backup copy of the hacked website, which will be used later when removing the malicious code.
Make sure the site is backed up regularly and multiple copies are kept at all times. A clean copy can also help when you restore your website later. Hosting usually makes backups, but there are many tools and plugins to create backups yourself.
Prepare maintenance mode
It is very important to initiate maintenance mode as soon as possible. Search engines constantly check the HTTP status of a website and what kind of content it offers its visitors. If a website is down or hosts malicious content, it will damage your rankings.
That is why it would be a good idea to prepare a simple HTML maintenance page before you get hacked. You can quickly turn it on while your website is being cleaned up, minimizing damage to visitors and search engines.
The best way to enable maintenance mode is to use .htaccess to redirect all requests to the HTML page. This way, if any malicious files are left on the domain will become inaccessible and will be redirected to the specified page.
Clean up the website and remove vulnerabilities
To clean up a website, you can restore it from a clean backup or remove malicious code from files and databases. Regardless of the cleaning method, you will need to make sure that the vulnerability is fixed afterwards.
Restoring a clean backup is the fastest, easiest, and cheapest option that most people will be able to do on their own with their backup tool. However, it has some drawbacks. If you are using a website that is updated frequently, you may lose some data. Also, you can never be sure that a restored backup is completely clean.
Removing malicious code from files and databases, and fixing a vulnerability isaneffective option, but it can be difficult to do depending on the hack. If you are not entirely sure of what you are doing, it is better to use protection in a third-party service.
Restore everything
At the end of the process, you must change the passwords of all users, tools, and devices that have access to your website (cPanel, FTP, SSH, etc.).