Manchester based web developer and designer of high quality websites, printed matter and moving images.

Theres nothing like waking up, checking your businesses website. To discover its only been attacked by some website hacker. I recently found myself in that exact situation, so heres my one stop guide of how to cope with it. Once you know you’ve been hacked of course.

1. Dont Panic. Your website is now a crime scene. Its vital you preserve all the evidence of whats happened to your site. So you can stop it again.
2. Check your other sites. if you share a number of websites on one hosting package its highly likely they where exploited.
3. Take the hacked site down and put a maintenance page up. The last thing you want to do is scare all your customers with your lack of security
4. Change all your passwords It could be as simple as this, reset all your account passwords. By that I mean EVERYTHING. FTP, MYSQL, windows login, whatever just make sure the new ones are long hard and complicated. Check who has access to the site and that your sharing settings are secure on your own computer.
5. Record everything Take note of what and when anything changed. Keep a record of the specific times. This will help you clarify what method you where hacked and stop them again. Keep a copy of the pages the hackers exploited or uploaded. As well as any PHP error logs or FTP logs.
6. Scan for viruses and malware. They might of infected you with malware, a spider, viruses or any number of evils. Better safe than sorry.
7. Get Backup If your with a good host, they should keep a backup of your site. Usually they take a snapshot of your site nightly so it could be simple case of pressing reset. If your not so lucky, better dig out all your own backups.
8. Investigate, if the hacker left his tag or link on your site. Carefully inspect it, google it. Another trick is to google your website link and words like “Defaced” or “hacked”. This will usually garner a wealth of information that will indicate the exact exploit the hackers used to get into your site.
9. Dont get even lets face it your gonna be pissed but your probally best letting it go. You dont want to upset a hornets nest of hackers after all.
10. Scan for vunerabilities theres a number of great web vulnerability scanners out there. I strongly suggest Acunetix vunerability scanner
11. learn how to hack websites in order to prevent it happening your going to have to learn how to hack your website.
12. Fix it, delete it, block it if you cant secure it, limit the access. Your never going to be 100% hack proof but you can make it harder. Finally, If you know what their IP range is, ban them. Maybe even a countries ip range temporarily if it doesnt effect business too much. Better safe than sorry, good luck!

Once i know for sure what happened with my websites I will post about how I hope i prevented it. Fingers Crossed.

For now a great place to start researching is perishablepress.