Every day someone is getting hacked. Why? Who knows. It could be for malicious intentions or for someone’s personal fun. The world of hacking contains a whole community of its own that it is hard to figure out a reason why such things happen. However, for the regular website owner, how do you know when you have been hacked. In this article, I will cover signs that your website has been hacked.

Signs That Your Website Has Been Hacked

PWNED

Being pwned is a way for hackers to tagged or vandalize your site with a message saying who hacked you, and that they successfully did so. Often it is a simple page they have put in place of your usual index.html or index.php file so your visitors will see only their message.

DDOS

A DDoS is a distribute denial of service attack. This is where the hacker targets a server and sends as much data to overload the system. This is temporary, but a nuisance as often sites slow down to a trickle until they are completely down.

Brute Force Login Attack

This is where the hacker tries to use as many combinations as possible in a short period to gain access to a website. If the user has a password that is simple, then the hacker can get in and choose to leave their own mark on the website. In some minor cases, the hacker just changes the password.

Code Injection

A code injection is usually something that happens with out of date programs or unsecured programs. It allows the hacker to install malware on a website that could possibly be detrimental to website visitors if they click on the link or malware. Often these are links or even links from pop-ups.

The issue with this is that a lot of times the link or pop-up at a first glance seems to be from a trusted source. The best thing to do is to exit the site and try to inform the website owner on one of their social networks. Some of the code injections are simple and only require updating a plugin, a theme, a specific script, or the overall program that the site operates with. Others may require going into the database and removing the infected tables or possibly even having the server scanned. Please do note that some cases of code injections do not turn up positive for an infected website, so it is necessary to carefully look into all files for suspicious code.

Visible signs

Sometimes your Internet Provider may produce messages like the following if your site is unsafe to surf.

Sometimes your listing might look strange on the search engines with a title that is different from your site and a different description.

The best methods to combat against hacking is to keep your server, and website’s software and programs up to date. It would also not hurt to use extra methods of hardening security.

Has your site ever been hacked? What did you do to prevent your site being hacked again?