My Website Got Hacked, Now What?

It’s that unsuspecting call you receive from a customer telling you about porn on the front page of your website.

Yes, it happened … your website got hacked.

Here is what you need to do.

Change your password on your Content Management System. Many businesses have WordPress websites so you will want to change the Administrator password and the passwords for all users that have access to the CMS.

Contact whoever hosts your website and see if they are having any security issues. You will also want to have them change the FTP and SHELL passwords if they are applicable.

Contact your website developer and have them update any plugins they have utilized on the website. Most hacks are going to occur at the plugin level. Sometimes there will be exploits that have not been patched yet. In these instances, you will need to identify the offending plugin and disable it until a patch is released.

Have your website developer sort through the code and remove any malicious code they find. They should be able to perform a scan on your entire website to make sure there is no malicious code.

The best way to repair a hacked website is to not let it get hacked in the first place. We recommend utilizing a local hosting company like St Louis Web Hosting Company that doesn’t allow just anyone to host a website on their server.

St Louis Web Hosting Company is a sister company to Timmermann Group. We created this company because of the number of issues we kept having ourselves with the large hosting companies.

For instance, most large hosting companies such as GoDaddy allow pornography websites to be hosted on their shared servers. They allow thousands of websites to be hosted on the same server without any sort of regulation.

The more websites a company can host on one server, the more profit they yield. However, a server is only as strong as its weakest link. One bad website that has been compromised can infect multiple websites on the same server.

If you are tired of dealing with the issues from your current hosting company, contact us to discuss alternative options that Timmermann Group could provide.