In the unfortunate event where you know that your Joomla website is hacked you need to follow the below steps:
- Remain calm: Your website is hacked – period. There’s nothing that you can do to change this fact, and most of the harm is already done. Why panic? In addition, most website owners/managers experience the hacking of at least one website they own/manage at a certain point in time. So you’re not really alone in this.
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Assess the situation: Is the website no longer functioning? Is the website attempting to download some malicious content to the visitors’ machines? Is the website showing a blank page or obscene images/text on the homepage? Assess the situation of your website in order to know what to do in the next steps.
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Redirect all the traffic to an “under-maintenance page”: It’s better to get not traffic at all rather than to get traffic and infect your visitors’ machines (your website most likely will be reported and Google, as well as many search engines, will de-index it or will show a warning next to search results linking to your website). You can do this by creating a maintenance.html file, uploading it to your webroot by adding the following line to your .htaccess file and commenting out all the other lines (the .htaccess file is located under the root of your web folder):
RewriteRule !^maintenance\.html$ /maintenance.html [L,R=302]The maintenance.html file consists of the following code:
<html>
<head>
<title>Your Website Name - Under Maintenance</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Your Website Name Is Under Maintenance</h1>
</body>
</html> -
Identify and fix the problems: If you have some programming experience, you need to examine what are the files/data that were changed (and how they were changed) and then fix them immediately.
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Call the experts: If you don’t have any programming experience, or if you can’t locate/solve the problem by yourself, then just call the Joomla Security Experts. These experts will help you immediately, and they will most likely be able to restore your website to its previous condition faster than you do!
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Protect your website: Follow these security tips to protect your Joomla website, so that the unfortunate event that has already occurred will not reoccur again.
Note that you can contact us at any time (even at midnight) and we will help you restore and cleanup your website in no time. Not only that, we will do our best to ensure that your website becomes immune to future attacks of the same kind. We will also advise you on what to do (and what not to do) to ensure that your website remains secure.
[…] previous posts, we have discussed how you know if your Joomla website is hacked and what to do when you discover that it’s hacked. Right now, we want to discuss what will happen to your Joomla website when it’s […]