Hacked Website: How To Solve It

Hackers conduct criminal activities on thousands of web sites everyday. Some of these hacks are invisible to both the web owner and visitors. But, it is always dangerous for anyone to view the infected web page. For instance, the hacker can infect the web page with a harmful code, that can install commands into the website visitors’ devices, stealing login credentials, credit card information, installing malware, or spying on online monetary transactions.

Just in case you are a web owner, I will quickly show you, how you can look for signs and symptoms that your website is being hacked.

Hacked Website Through Google Detection:

This is the easiest way to see if you have a hacked website.

As you normally search around for something in google, you can search for your own website in google. If Google’s algorithm had already detected that you have are infected, it will show you like the animated picture below:

Just in case that you are not clear whether your site is truly hacked, or if you think that your site is incorrectly flagged, you can either consult your web advisor or use google search console. Proceed to check on the security issues section of the search console and check on the urls in which google detected as a hacked website.

If you’re not able to see the hacked content at the urls provided in the Google Search Console, the hacker might be utilizing a method called cloaking

Cloaking Makes Hacked Websites Harder To Clean

Cloaking makes the infected site harder to clean,  as it will show the infected content to different users. An example, will be when you enter your web page like www.example.com/products, you may see a page without any infected contents. As a web site owner, you might be convinced that the hacked website does not exist. But as you, your visitors or Google’s system enters your site, which is www.example.com/products, the infected contents are present.

If you are a webmaster specialist and would like to test for the presence of cloaking, you can use Google’s Hacked Sites Troubleshooter. This troubleshooter will enable you to utilize “site:” search operator and Google URL Inspection Tool that allows you to thoroughly look for any cloaking content in your hacked website.