New first stop for hacked site recovery

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

We certainly hope you never have to use our new Help for hacked sites informational series. It’s a
dozen articles and over an hour of videos dedicated to helping webmasters in the unfortunate event
that their site is compromised.

If you have further interest in why cybercriminals hack sites for spammy purposes, see Tiffany
Oberoi’s explanation in
Step 5: Assess the damage (hacked with spam).

And if you’re curious about malware, Lucas Ballard from our Safe Browsing team, explains more
about the topic in
Step 5: Assess the damage (hacked with malware).

While we attempt to outline the necessary steps in recovery, each task remains fairly difficult
for site owners unless they have advanced knowledge of system administrator commands and
experience with source code. For helping fellow webmasters through the difficult recovery time,
we’d like to thank the
steady members in Webmaster Forum.
Specifically, in the subforum
Malware and hacked sites,
we’d be remiss not to mention the amazing contributions of
Redleg and
Denis Sinegubko.

How to avoid ever needing help for hacked sites

Just as you focus on making a site that’s good for users and search-engine friendly, keeping your
site secure—for you and your visitors—is also paramount. When site owners fail to keep
their site secure, hackers may exploit the vulnerability. If a hacker exploits a vulnerability,
then you might need Help for hacked sites. So, to potentially avoid this scenario:

• Be vigilant about keeping software updated
• Understand the security practices of all applications, plugins, third-party software, and so on,
  before you install them on your server. A security vulnerability in one software application can
  affect the safety of your entire site
• Remove unnecessary or unused software
• Enforce creation of strong passwords
• Keep all devices used to log in to your servers secure (updated operating system and browser)
• Make regular, automated backups of your site

Help for hacked sites can be found at
Web Fundamentals. We look forward
to not seeing you there!

Written by
Maile Ohye,
Developer Programs Tech Lead