Ways to find out if your website is hacked or not

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

The website is the property of a company, multiple individuals, or a single person, and on the internet there are lots of websites that compromised daily by cybercriminals. Website hacking is not a new thing. Cybercriminals crawl the web for vulnerable sites and target the websites you might not expect like small-medium sized websites, blogs, etc. but if a website is compromised by a talented professional hacker then the scary reality is that no one will probably ever know that the site has been hacked and you are unlikely to determine a hack. So in this article, I am giving you signs that can help you to check that the security of your site is compromised or not.

Why Do Hackers Hack Websites?
There is no specific reason for the attack but if your website matches cybercriminals criteria then they try to hack websites for reasons like stealing money, promote their own content, accessing sensitive data, getting attention, causing embarrassment and disruption, or just for fun.

Signs That Your Web Site is Hacked

The Red Screen of Death or Warning Messages:- If you are opening your website in the internet browser and if a red screen or warning message appears instead of your website is a telltale sign that your website needs some deep cleaning.

Some similar messages that you may see:

• Phishing attack warnings.
• Malware attack warnings.
• The site ahead contains harmful programs.
• The website has been reported as unsafe.
• Deceptive site ahead.
• Suspected phishing site.
• This site may harm your computer.

Hosting Company Disabled Your Website:- Hosting companies regularly scan their servers for malicious code and if they found any malware they immediately disable malicious websites. Some hosting companies immediately format a server or infected hosting account. Sometimes hosting companies notify you via email that your website has been compromised but always contact the customer service and confirm it.

Your Site Crashes or Loads Very Slow:- If Suddenly your website load time is increased and shows error messages is an indication that malware is utilizing your server resources. Most targeted pages are the signup, payment, login, and checkout pages.

Redirection:- Some attackers try to re-direct your site to malicious sites. they use server-side code manipulation or cross-site scripting to redirect your web traffic to phishing pages, compromised websites, or competitor websites.

Unable to log in:- Admin account has a powerful role in your website. The administrator has full access to all areas of a site. So if you are unable to login to your website, then there is a chance that hackers may have deleted your admin account or quietly create admin profiles that they later misuse. Sometimes the hackers skinning your admin section to look like your public-facing site so the admin Section of your site and the public Section of your site looks the same.

Ads & Pop-Ups:- When hackers want to earn money they hack your website to show Malicious Popups and spam ads in your site. These pop-ups do not appear for an already logged-in visitor or visitors accessing a website directly. Only the traffic that is coming directly from the search engine gets to interact with such spam advertisements or popups.

Emails:- Many hosting service provides free email accounts. Hackers use hacked websites to send spam emails to a huge number of people. Resulting in the email servers around the world may have blacklist your server and it’s IP address. Sometimes admin is not able to notice that his site is hacked, they just think that Emails are not working anymore.

Traffic:- If you see a sudden drop or hike in traffic spike it is unusual. Hackers use spamvertising to vandalize blogs, forums, websites, and comment sections with hyperlinks to get a higher search engine ranking for the hacker’s website. Browser safety alerts and redirection can drop the traffic and spam traffic can increase the load on servers as well. hackers put a link in your site which can hosts malware or redirects traffic to another spam site and spam emails are sent from your server that contains links to new or existing malicious pages that are created by the hacker.

Search Results:- When your site appears in the search results and if you see a message "This Site May Be Hacked" or search results show "Japanese or Gibberish Character" that means your site has been compromised and hackers are using your website to host spammy content.
To Check Your Site, In Google Search results use:- site:websitename.com 

Tools and Remote Scanners To Detect Infections In Your Site

• VirusTotal:- VirusTotal has a URL and FILE scanning feature. It scans over 70+ major blacklist and malware engines to check that your website is hacked or not. To scan your website (click here).
• Google Safe Browsing Status:- To Check Blacklist Status on Google Safe Browsing Site Status page (click here). Simply enter your site name in the search bar and it will show you blacklist status of your website and details of the hack with the steps you can take to fix it.
• Spamhaus.org:- To check your site IP address and hostname against the various SpamHaus lists (click here). If your site appears in results, it has been flagged for included in spam emails that means your site has been compromised.
• Aw-snap.info:- Aw snap is a tool to scan a website for malware, malicious redirects, malicious scripts, and other bad stuff. It highlights iframes, script tags, and other detectable code injections and lets you view your HTTP headers which can help you see malicious code. To scan your website (click here).

CONCLUSION:- This article is based on ways to find out if your website was hacked or not. If you have any queries feel free to ask in the comment section.