How To: Fix Your Hacked and Malware-Infested Website with Google

While websites may run smoothly without any noticeable vulnerabilities, there's always the looming threat that any background weakness in the site can be exploited by hackers. Once a site is compromised, it can be difficult to get it fixed without the proper help.

Google has recently launched a new series entitled "Webmasters help for hacked sites", which teaches web developers and site owners how to avoid getting hacked and how to recover their website if it gets compromised in any way.

Any of these look familiar?

Yeah, we all have, and if we're just Googlers, we never visit a site if one of those warnings shows up, so it's important to get it fixed!

The Overview of Fixing a Hacked Site

The overview of the entire series is encapsulated into a short video which goes over the following:

• How and why sites are hacked.
• Process to recover a site and remove the user-facing warning label.
• Time-to-recovery depends on extent of damage and technical skill of administrator.
• What's the next step? Do it yourself or get help from specialists?

Once you get the idea, it's time to move on to actually fixing it...

The Recovery Process

The first thing you should do is probably contact your hoster and build a support team. Then, the rest of the recovery process starts to get a little harder, but totally doable if you know what you're doing.

• Contact your hoster and build a support team (Beginner)
• Quarantine your site (Intermediate)
• Touch base with Webmaster Tools (Intermediate)
• Assess the damage (hacked with spam) or Assess the damage (hacked with malware) (Advanced)
• Identify the vulnerability (Advanced)
• Clean and maintain your site (Advanced)
• Request a review (Intermediate)

These steps should help you and anyone you know to prevent infections that can steal loads of valuable information, such as login credentials, financial transactions, phone numbers, addresses, and social security numbers.

If hackers get can get an access to all that, it's just bad news. Good thing Google is here to help.