Hacked websites that contain malware are sometimes hard to detect without going through a malware scanner. The website can be running fine, but malware is doing its job without notice in the background. Fortunately, there are some general signs that can help you recognize the hack> In this post, I will give you some highlights on how to know if your website is hacked or not.
Signs of Hacked Site:
Those are some general signs that indicates that a website is hacked such as:
1- You are seeing spam content or malicious ads on your website,
2- You are unable to login to the dashboard of your website .
3- Your daily traffic has decreased substantially.
4- You or your visitors receive an alert from the browser when visiting the site.
5- The Website is loading slower than usual.
6- Your hosting providers took your site offline.
7- Google Flags your website and displays some thing like this
The above are some signs that you or your visitors will notice if a site is hacked or contains malware. To make sure, you need to use one or more of the following malware scanners.
How to Know if Your Website is Hacked?
1- Use online website Malware Scanner
Sucuri Site Check one of the best-known online website scanner that offers free site scanning. It can be used on any platform, including Joomla, WordPress, and Magneto. Sucuri is fast and can tell you in a few moments if the website has malware, or blacklisted.
2- Use a Plugin Malware Scanner
MalCare is a premium all-in-one security plugin to scan, protect, and clean up from malware and other security vulnerability. Malcare is available in 2 versions, free and paid . In the case of the paid plugin, you don’t need to manually scan it regularly as the plugin will send you instant notification if your website got affected by Malware.
3- Use Google Search Console
How to know if a website is hacked? You can know this with the help of Google Search Console. It is a brilliant and free tool that solves many problems of website developers and owners. If your website is indexed on Google search engine, then Google makes sure that no website is hacked or contains a virus. Google issue a timely notification about any fishy activity on your website security.
Simply log in to your Google Search Console and click on Security and Manual Actions to find out whether your website is hacked or not. Unfortunately, Google does not offer a solution but sending alters is still enough information for you as a website owner to look at your website security measures.
Use Safe Browsing site status:
This is another free tool by Google which have the answer to your question How to know if a website is hacked? This tool will help you to find all the hacked content of your website and give you report of the remaining issues following a hack. This tool also can be used when you are investigating whether your website is hacked or not. It will automatically perform the task through different strategies and steps to find the hacked content on a website.
Google maintains a list of potentially unsafe sites, and they provide us with a free tool to check if any site is unsafe to visit. With Safe Browsing, you get alerts about malware, risky extensions, phishing or hacked sites. Check this tool at the following link
Google Safe Browsing Site Status
Keep an eye on the warning from search engine and browsers:
If you don’t want to go use tools that required some technical knowledge, then you can simply use Google search result about your website to find out whether your website is hacked or not. Simply enter your website on Google to find out this. Google does show the warning message to the infected website.
Same as Google search results, the web browsers like Chrome do not allow their users to visit the hacked websites. They show the warning sign before actually load the site. The typical message which the search result shows about the hacked website is “This site may be hacked.” This appeared in both cases, whether your website got hacked or contain a virus that can damage your visitor’s computer system.
How to fix a hacked website?
Once you know How to know if a website is hacked, the next step should be how to fix it. Malware removal plugin should be the first thing you should think about if your website is based on CMS. Malware may look like a small website infection in the start but if not treated on time, it can cause big issues. You can try the MalCare plugin to remove Malware instantly.
Malware removal not only removes the virus from the website which causes hackers to access your website admin panel but Malware removal can also scan for future security problems.
To stop future hacking attacks, you must improve your website security. In the case of WordPress, you can try the best WordPress security plugins or if you don’t want to use plugins, then you can go with the second option which is How to secure WordPress without a plugin. The more security options you include on your website, there would be fewer chances of getting attacked by hackers.
For more information about the subject, you can read this article by google