How Do you Know that You are Being Hacked?
Most website owner fail to understand as to why their personal or business website would be hacked when it does not have any such information which could be used for any purpose other than general information about their work.
The website is not hacked only to get information about credit cards or secret company information or business mails. The purpose of the hackers, mostly, is different and can be as under:-
Host Malware: Any computer visiting your website can become infected or emails can be sent to those visiting your website convincing them to download a malware file.
URL Redirect: By changing a few lines of HTML code, your hacked site becomes a “front door” to bad ware. When a computer visits your site, it is instantly redirected to a page filled with spam product or malware.
Hosting, Phishing, Spam Pages & Pornography: Your hacked website can now have one or two static pages. The unwitting visitor to your clean page now goes to phishing pages for banks or PayPal or spam pages for pharmaceuticals or male sex enhancers… your website can becomes a vendor for pornography without your knowledge.
Vandalism: Some hackers want to just want to personally embarrass the website owner. Sometimes, your competitor may be the cause. Some times its just fund seekers, who are learning hacking and want to improve their log book entries.
Site Owners Trends.
Most site owners in Pakistan consider the security of their website is sole responsibility of their hosting company and they (being non technical) have nothing to do with it. On the other hand the web hosting companies would tend take only part of the responsibility and while lot of it has to do with the webmaster. The web masters in Pakistan are mostly illiterate or unaware of any thing about cyber security and responsibilities in this regards.
A recent survey (done by StopBadware & Commtouch) of 600 website owners who’s websites had been hacked found:
63% did not know they had been hacked.
20% were hacked because hackers exploited out of date or insecure software on their site.
12% were hacked because the computer used to update their website was infected with a virus or malware.
9% were convinced they were hacked as part of an all-out attack on the server where their website was hosted.
6% said their username/password (or their colleague’s) was used to access their website.
2% used a public computer or public WiFi network at an internet cafe to make changes on their website.
How Do you Know Your Website is Being Hacked.
Frankly, there is no single clear way to adopt to get to know you are being or have been hacked. Only the ones who are carful about their website and keep taking care of security aspect would be the one who can save misuse of their website.
Warning messages: If your website has been hacked to spread malware, this can trigger warning messages from search engines, web browsers, and anti-virus software when you try to access the site. If you receive any of these warnings, or hear about them from someone who visited your site, there’s a good chance you’ve been hacked.
Some of the sites which may provide you guidlines on the your pages being clearn or not are given below, however, this should not be considered end of it.
Google's own tool here:
http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=xxx
Replace your domain for xxx above.
Then try these:
http://www.unmaskparasites.com/
http://wepawet.iseclab.org
Website redirects: If your website visitors are redirected to another site when they try to visit yours (and you didn’t set up the redirect yourself), then you’ve probably been hacked.
Suspicious code/files and folders: Strange code or files in your website’s source code (like ones named after prescription drugs or other “spammy” words) are also a good indicator that you’ve been hacked. If you don’t regularly scan your website’s source code for malicious files and code (either manually or using a software program), then you should probably start!
Google says "This site may harm your computer" If Google or Yahoo search engine result pages (SERPs) display a warning about your site, the most common cause is that your site was hacked.
You receive emails from loyal visitors informing you of virus or trojan warnings they received while on your site.
Your website loads significantly slower than usual.
Your passwords to log into your site’s admin panel or FTP stop working.
Significant changes in traffic.
Influx of spam emails.
By WebSouls Team
