What To Do If You’ve Been Hacked
Hacking can occur at any time and to anyone. Some websites are more vulnerable than others. But even a well-secured website can fall prey to a highly determined hacker who has done an extensive amount of homework. Imagine waking up one day and checking your website only to find that everything has been compromised. Who knows what the hacker must have done to your website’s content and data. This may include passwords to email in a membership database.
Is it game over? Do you just simply turn off the computer and call it quits? Do you start over and create a new website? This article will guide you in an event that your website has been hacked.
Try Not To Panic
It may sound insensitive considering how just horrible a situation of being hacked is, but the reason not to panic is that everything is not over. You’re going to have a checklist to follow to ensure that your website is still recoverable. For you to do that, it’s very important to be level-headed. It’s easier said than done, but just remember that there still things you can do to save your website.
Find Out What’s Been Affected In Your Website
Not all hacking incidents are the same. The hacker might phish for some of your website’s data or they might have even modified or altered your web page’s content. It varies across hacking habits and methods. Some can be even as serious as a system-wide hacking where not only your website’s been affected but every website in your hosting provider’s server has been compromised. However, no matter what the damage, it’s crucial to assess what has gone wrong on your website. Reasons for such is you’ll be compiling a damage report which you want to relay to a team of professionals so that they can prepare for you the appropriate guidelines based on the details of the report you’ve provided.
Call The People In Charge Of Your Website
If you had a professional web developer build your website, make sure to give them a call and tell them everything that has gone wrong. Naturally, they’re the ones who are the most knowledgeable about the nooks and crannies of your website, so they’ll run whatever checks they need to do and figure out a contingency plan to recover your website or at least come up with any plan to ensure that no further damage can be done to your website.
Call Your Hosting Company
It’s also important to get in touch with your hosting service provider. Not only do you need to find out whether your website’s a victim of a system-wide server attack or not, but your hosting service provider will most likely have a backup of your website before it was compromised. Hosting service providers are required to back up their clients' data, however, some run more frequent backups than others.
Get In Touch With A Professional
Most importantly, you need to contact a web security expert to conduct a thorough cleanup of your website. The hacker might have surreptitiously left behind their own scripts which gives them a backdoor entrance to your website to conduct attacks again. Your security expert not only cleans your website but they’ll also provide advice to you regarding key prevention methods to ensure that your website won’t be hacked- or at least ensure that hackers will have an even more difficult time to infiltrate your website.
Final Word
Ultimately, it’s vital not only to keep calm throughout the whole situation, but you also have to be aware to contact the right people. The more time you waste not contacting the right people, the more damage the hacker might do to your system. Your website certainly wasn’t a small investment, so be sure that you have the right people looking after it.
