Is My Site Hacked? How to Check If Your Website Has Been Hacked

Is your website hacked or not? This is the question! And the earlier you find out the answer, the better. A hacked website can cost your business a lot of money, including a spoiled reputation and customer loyalty.

That’s why you should invest in cybersecurity, constantly implement security updates of your modules and plugins and take other preventative actions to reduce the risks of a hacker attack. However, you should always be on the lookout for sophisticated hackers. Find out how to check if your website is hacked so you can detect this as soon as possible and fix your hacked site.

Signs that your website has been hacked

• Checking tools show that your website is hacked

There are many tools, both online and installable, free and paid, that automatically check whether your site contains any malware or is safe. If you have some suspicions or want to prevent any issues, use these instead of waiting for visible manifestations of a hacker attack.

For example, you can use Google Safe Browsing, which is free, online, and supported by the most powerful search engine around. Just insert the URL of your site there and within seconds the result will be displayed. You’ll see when Google bots have crawled your website the last time and whether any suspicious activity was detected or not.

• Google Search Console notifies you about your infected website

If you care about your SEO, then you probably have already added your website to Google Search Console, which was previously called Google Webmaster Tools.

In this case, you will receive an email and see notifications inside the Console every time Google finds any critical issues like malicious code or spammy content while crawling your site. You’ll have an opportunity to fix everything and save your reputation before your users start seeing a warning about your harmful website and before you start losing customer trust and loyalty.

• The browser shows warnings when opening a page

When browser bots have detected some suspicious and dangerous activity on your website, they blacklist you and show a message to warn all Internet users.

So if there is really something wrong with your site and hackers have gained an access to it, then when trying to open your web page something like this will be displayed: “Warning: Visiting this site may harm your computer,” “The site ahead contains harmful programs,” “The site ahead contains malware,” “Deceptive site ahead,”, “Phishing attack ahead,” and so on, depending on the type of trouble.

• Your site is marked as hacked or harmful on the SERP

In the list of the Google search results hacked and harmful websites are flagged with a corresponding sentence to warn users and prevent them from clicking on unsafe links.

If users on their own risk clicking on the link labeled as “This site may harm your computer” from the result page, they’ll see one more warning on the red background as shown above before reaching a website. “This site may be hacked” notifications usually don’t lead to the malware warning page.

• Customers complain about your hacked website

If your website shows clear signs of being hacked, then thousands of its visitors are more likely to notice this before you do. If their credit cards information or user private data is being compromised, then they will be especially eager to contact you.

So if you get lots of calls and emails with complaints and questions from your customers, it is likely that your website has been hacked. Start taking actions immediately and inform your clients that you are working on solving this issue.

At first, take your website offline to stop spreading malware and making the situation worse while you figure out the cause.

To recap

So always be aware of what is going on with your web resource. If you need to check if your website is hacked, fix your hacked site or improve your website security, contact our IT specialists. We can monitor your site and react in timely manner to any issues.