Received an email saying your site has been hacked ?

Every day, criminals compromise thousands of websites. Hacks are often invisible to users, yet remain harmful to anyone viewing the page — including the site owner. For example, unbeknownst to the site owner, the hacker may have infected their site with harmful code which in turn can record keystrokes on visitors’ computers, stealing login credentials for online banking or financial transactions.

So we have decided to fight back against the hackers. When we clean a website we set our servers of to actively look for other websites that have the same issue. When they find one we actively try to contact the owners and let them know they have been compromised.

Of course we understand that this is news you do not want to hear and we are not going to be popular in telling you this. Yet we still feel that you would rather know that your business website is being used to sell Viagra, Numerous Drugs, Cheap Pay Day Loans ,etc

Hackers purposively try to hide the hack from the website owner. They employ a variety of techniques to hide or cloak the hack from the site owner and from Google. The most common techniques utilized by hackers is the conditional hack, the redirect to a malicious site only occurs when the user has found their website from a search engine such as google. So to see the hack try the following..

Do a Google search for pages on your website that contain terms such as pharmacy, cialis or viagra. To do this you do a search in Google with the following text:site:www.yourdomain.com (pharmacy|cialis|viagra)

Make sure in the search term above to replace the www.yourdomain.com. So if you website was www.newcompany.com you would search for site:www.newcompany.com (pharmacy|cialis|viagra)

The screenshot below is the sort of results you will see. Not the sort of Google results you want people seeing about your business hey ? It is worse than that though as soon with this sort of Hack Google will Blacklist your website so visitors are warned not to go to your websites!

Most small businesses think they are too insignificant to warrant hacker attention – that they have nothing important to ‘steal’ anyway. But the truth is, when your website domain is hijacked or your website is used to perpetrate crimes against others – such as your customers, business clients, or even your own employees – your company website has a definite value to hackers. Criminals use corrupted and infected websites to spread infections to other PCs, thereby fuelling data theft as well as perpetuating scams which steal money from online bank accounts or trick people into disclosing their personal information for instance.

There are more automated hacking bots each day visiting your website looking for vulnerabilities than there are people visiting your website.

Attackers don’t discriminate by company type, size, valuation, or any other characteristic of the business itself. Instead, they look for one thing: vulnerability. Automated tools constantly scour the internet looking for vulnerable sites. Small and medium sized business sites are rarely protected properly, which makes them easy pickings for hackers and automated hacking tools.

This means that every single business that has a website needs to look at site security because if your website does get hacked, your domain name could be blacklisted and that means no website traffic, no inquiries and no emails.

Many Business owners first response when we inform them is Who Did It ? Was it You ?. We understand this is a natural reaction to such bad news and like to point out ‘ Hey Don’t Shoot The Messenger’ . Realise though your website is just in the same situation as millions of other Small Business Websites. Because the internet is abstract, it’s hard to grasp how real online threats to your website are, but according to Forbes 30,000 websites are hacked a day and most of those belong to small businesses. That’s a website hacked every 3 seconds!.

While many statistics have been published recently about small business security, here are some general findings:

20% of all small businesses will be hacked within one year
(source: National Cyber Security Alliance)
31% of targeted attacks focus on businesses with fewer than 250 employees
(source: Symantec)
62% percent of data breaches impact smaller organisations
(source: Verizon)
2013 show web based attacks are up 23%
(source: Symantec)
1 in 8 legitimate websites have a critical vulnerability
(source: Symantec)

Attackers don’t discriminate by company type, size, valuation, or any other characteristic of the business itself. Instead, they look for one thing: vulnerability. Automated tools constantly scour the internet looking for vulnerable sites. Small and medium sized business sites are rarely protected properly, which makes them easy pickings for hackers and automated hacking tools.

This means that every single business that has a website needs to look at site security because if your website does get hacked, your domain name could be blacklisted and that means no website traffic, no inquiries and no emails.

The fact is you were likely hacked by an Automated Hack Bot Running from Russia, China, etc. If you want to trace down who hacked your website the first steps we would recommend are to check the filesystem on your server for unexpected update times. Then check you Webserver access logs against these times and record the IPs of the unusual access. Perform a trace on these IPs to find their location. Our team can do this investigation for you, but our recommendation is to really put all your time and effort into cleaning your website from infection FAST!.