Warning: If you suspect your website has been compromised,
act quickly but calmly. many successful recoveries start with clear,
methodical detection followed by containment and restoration.Understand: A website compromise can look like many things, fr...
Warning: If you suspect your website has been compromised,
act quickly but calmly. many successful recoveries start with clear,
methodical detection followed by containment and restoration.
Understand: A website compromise can look like many things, from
overt defacement and spam injection to subtle data exfiltration or
hidden cryptocurrency miners. this guide walks through seven practical
checks you can run right away to assess whether your site has been hacked and what to do next.
Why it matters: The real cost of an undetected compromise
Consider: A hacked website is more than an embarrassing banner or a
few spam links. it risks customer data, search engine reputation, email
deliverability, and your hosting relationship. attackers can embed
backdoors that let them come back later, use your site to phish
visitors, or add code that mines cryptocurrency and exhausts resources.
Remember: The longer a compromise remains undetected, the higher
the chance of permanent damage, lost backups, leaked credentials, or
downstream harm to users. early detection sharply reduces cleanup time
and cost.
Check 1: Google search console and "security issues"
Check: If you haven't already, register your site with google
search console (gsc) and confirm ownership. gsc includes a "security
issues" panel that reports malware, social engineering, and hacked
content detected by google's crawlers.
Tip: gsc often provides example URLs and infected snippets. even if
the report is sparse, treat a security alert as high priority, google
will sometimes suppress search listings and show warnings to users
before you notice traffic drops.
How to use it
Action: Open search console ? security & manual actions ?
security issues. follow the remediation links, then request a review
after you clean the site.
Check 2: Google safe browsing & third-party site reputation checks
Verify: Google safe browsing maintains a blocklist used by
browsers. several public tools let you query whether your domain appears
in that database; if your domain is listed, visitors will see red
warnings in chrome, firefox, and safari.
Also: Use multiple reputation tools (for example, site scanners,
"isitdown" pages, or web malware checkers) because each scanner has
slightly different signatures and heuristics. a clean result on one
scanner doesn't guarantee safety, use a small battery of checks.
Check 3: Visible site behavior, defacement, redirects, and odd UI
Look: Walk through your site as a new visitor would, using an
incognito window or a machine that doesn't have admin cookies. look for
unexpected banners, popups, forced downloads, or content that doesn't
belong to you.
Read the entire article inside the Is it hacked blog: https://isithacked.com/blog/is-my-site-hacked-7-wa...