Fixing your “This site may be hacked” message

How Do You Know If Your Website May Have Been Hacked? Google Knows! The Google ‘This site may be hacked’ alert added to your website is guaranteed to keep visitors away in droves. Needless to say, if Google search results label your website as hacked — it is very bad for business.

The “This site may be hacked” notification won’t be removed until the webmaster of the site takes action.

Try these steps to fix your website:

• Register and verify your site in Google’s Search Console.
• Sign in to Search Console and check the “Security Issues” section to see details of sample URLs that might be hacked.
• Fix the security issue that allowed your website to be infected. Otherwise, your site is likely to be reinfected.
• Read Google’s resources for hacked sites for detailed information on how to fix your website.
• Request a review in the Security Issues section in Search Console when your entire website is clean and secure. After Google checks that your site is fixed, they’ll remove the “This site may be hacked” message.

How was my website hacked?

Out of date or insecure software is an open door to hackers. If you run a WordPress site you will constantly see update alerts for plugins and themes. This is why. While plugin updates might improve functionality, they are also pushed out to counteract an insecurity.

But hackers don’t always need to break in by brute force. Sometimes you have unwittingly given them the keys. Keystroke loggers, hidden in free software that you have downloaded on to your own computer can report back your login credentials (as well as bank details and personal identity data).

Of course, if you use the same password and username across accounts, the massive data breaches reported by Target, Yahoo, LinkedIn and the like should be enough to make your hair stand on end. Stolen IDs are big business. As a site owner you put your own visitors at risk by not taking the basic security step of using a unique and strong user/password combination.

Hacking has been going on since the birth of the Internet, but lately online criminals have taken it to a new level. Not only are digital villains cracking into our email, social network profiles and bank accounts, but they are now hacking into websites for a whole host of reasons. This can cause huge losses in audience, reliability and really makes you or your business look incredibly unprofessional.

WordPress is one of the most popular platforms not only for blogs but for big websites too. Security is one of the most important aspects especially for WordPress CMS. Over the years you learn many ways to secure WordPress and to protect you against hackers.

Creative Web Design 123 can perform a security audit of your WordPress site to determine how well protected it is against hackers, and prepare a report card outlining what best practices you are already following and where you need to improve.

We will lock up your WordPress installation for you and help you understand how to adopt all of the best practices that we recommend, from building a firewall to configuring permissions. If adopting best practices causes conflicts with existing plugins that you have installed, we’ll assist you in working around or solving those problems.

One missed WordPress update is all it takes for hackers to potentially ruin all of our hard work.

If you run WordPress yourself, then you need to be concerned about how well protected your installation is. Your web host may be responsible for the security of their systems, but you are responsible for the software you run on them. That includes WordPress. If your content is important to you, you owe it to yourself to make the security of your site a priority.

Our services include:

• Assessing strengths and weaknesses. We can perform a security audit of your WordPress site to determine how well protected it is against hackers, and prepare a report card outlining what best practices you are already following and where you need to improve.
• Constructing site defenses. We can lock up your WordPress installation for you and help you understand how to adopt all of the best practices that we recommend.
• Security education. If you run a site which multiple people contribute to, I can assist you in educating them about best practices, whether that’s holding a webinar, group chat, teleconference, or possibly even visiting your offices in person. Remember, the security of your site is only as strong as the weakest link in your defenses.
• Recovering and restoring a compromised site. We can help you get back on your feet and reverse damage to your filesystem and database caused by hackers.

As you can see, most of our services are preventative in nature. There’s a reason for that! As the old adage goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Many folks who have had their WordPress installations broken into have learned this lesson the hard way. We’d like to help ensure that you never have to.

We can’t guarantee that you’ll be completely protected if you engage my services. But we can help you dramatically improve your ability to defend your WordPress site and the content you manage with it.

Prevent Your WordPress Blog From Being Hacked!

Creative Web Design 123 provides WordPress security services to protect your site from malicious attacks. We specialize in malware and virus removal. If your WordPress blog is hacked, broken, or you want to protect it, we are here to help.

Clean up

The first step is to actually get your site cleaned and the malicious pages removed.

Once your site is cleaned, and you verified (at least on SiteCheck), you should be safe to request the review on Google’s end. It will take a few days before they reply with the final verdict.

Have Your Website Checked Today And Secured Against Malicious Activity.

How secure is your website? Has it been hacked and you are unaware hat it has? Don’t wait until Google tells you, have your website checked and secured today to ensue you retain your ranking, enquiries and sales. This will save you the cost of cleaning up a hacked website. Speak to our Help Team to fix what the hackers have done!