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Dec 12

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Has Your Website Been Hacked!

Part of my on-line services is to carry out Web Site Maintenance for my clients. I update their websites, carry out the odd script installation, back up their databases and take regular back ups for them.

One of the worst support tickets I get is “HELP MY SITE HAS BEEN HACKED!” can you restore a back up for me. How does the client find out they have been hacked? well usually it’s because they have gone to log in to their site and instead of the normal login in page they are presented with this huge warning sign displayed in their Chrome Browser. Now I don’t know about you, but if I come across a site with a huge warning sign on it, I don’t go any further. It’s hit the back button now!

malware warningI’m sure you have all seen sites that pop up these big red boxes and have been frightened to death by them.

Imagine then, what if? that site was your site. Panic! No visitors and no way to earn any money from that site until the problem has been fixed. And sometimes that is not an easy fix either. Simply replacing the site with previous back up is not enough. These devils have installed a script to your hosting and have obtained your passwords. If you don’t change your hosting password and simply replace the files with a backup, the whole thing will start again. What is even worse is that unless you get to the root installation of the script, changing your password won’t help as they will have direct access to your server any time they like.

Won’t happen to me! – oh yes it will, no one is safe from these hackers and script junkies.  You can turn off anonymous FTP – they will get in even then. Once they have your master password and username they are in.

Here is the evidence of someone logging into FTP using the sites username and the sites password. It wasn’t given to them, they stole it off my clients local machine.

Hackers IP address

You can see from this picture that this hacker has logged in 28 times whereas my client has only logged in twice – yes we did trace the hacker all the way to Russia! This hacker had done a fair bit of damage and there was a lot of cleaning up to do.

But how on earth did it happen? Simple, you visited a site that wasn’t secure, had been hacked, Google hadn’t yet caught it to put the warning message up, and the script just downloaded itself onto your computer.

Hackers don’t care about you, your family, your income or anything other than doing as much damage to the sites and your computer as they can. They hide scripts on your hosting which then load themselves onto your computer, steal your information and generally cause as much damage as they can. Some of these scripts are so nasty you could actually end up involved in a criminal investigation because all of a sudden your computer is now part of some larger bot-net that is helping to spread these viruses, Trojans and hijackers. The authorities have tracked your computer and it’s IP address and they are knocking on your door right now!

Now I can offer you a service where I can clean your site for you, but rather than paying me £40.00 /$67.00, why not make sure you have the right strategies in place to prevent it happening at all.

If you have been hit, and people are everyday of the year, you need to do two things. One make sure your site is secure and two, make sure your PC is clean, just doing one is not enough.

So what to do to prevent your siste being hacked and your computer compromised?

Use Google or Bing or any other search engine and spend hours searching on-line for a solution.

You can hire me to remove the malware from your site and buy an expensive program to clean your computer

Once I have cleaned your site, I’ll install the right plugins (if it is a WordPress site) to keep it safe in the future.

Don’t risk it all, get your site locked down…
Stop Hackers In Their Tracks…

Don’t want to do it yourself, go to my services page and order a two hour time slot and we’ll get your site up and running again in no time. Purchase here

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