WEBSITE HACKERS:

If your site has never been hacked, you probably aren't worried about it, but perhaps you should be.

If you get hacked, your website could be distributing malicious code to your customers, friends and visitors, or hackers might have hijacked your search engine rankings. All without any visible change to the appearance of your website. It's an alarming prospect isn't it?

The most common targets for hackers are sites built with WordPress or other CMS (content management systems) like Joomla and Drupal. This type of site makes an attractive target for hacking for several reasons - any secutiry weaknesses are likely shared by multiple websites, hosting may be less secure and the website owner is less likely to be familiar with the code of their website and may not be as likely to notice the attack.

Since the first line of defence against hackers is your hosting service provider, sites hosted by free or low budget service providers may not have the same level of security and are vulnerable to hackers. If you ever do get hacked (or think you may have been), you should talk to your hosting service provider to see what security measures they can reccommend.

Hackers are doing much more subtle work these days, hiding code in the meta tags of your website to 'hijack' your search engine listings, or installing malicious code into your server to spread malware and their work may not be apparent when you use a browser to look through your website. Sometime it's obvious; you open your website and it's been altered or replaced, but more often hackers hide their work in your code.

Keeping a secure backup copy of your website will help you recover quickly if your site is hacked. Documenting the changes made to your site is an important step is you hope to be able to prosecute the hacker, although that's very often prohibitively difficult to do.

This article has some helpful steps you can take if you think your site might have been hacked: http://www.whoishostingthis.com/resources/website-hacked-checklist/

If have been hacked, I can help! Please email Andrea: info@agwebservices.com

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