Help! I've been hacked!!

Don't panic, but act fast

For many visiting this page, it is the first time you have been hacked. Your website has either been banned by Google or is about to be, it may have been defaced, or your hosting company has suspended your website. Yes, it is bad for your business, yes it is embarrassing, but don't panic. Our best advice is to act fast to repair the site before larger problems appear due to inaction.

Call us immediately on 1300 228 100 (in Australia)

Our team of web professionals can help you find the best path forward get you going again.

Why did you get hacked?

If companies like Sony, NASA, The New York Times and Citibank, who spend millions of dollars every year on security, can get hacked, then your relatively small website will be a piece of cake. More on famous hacks here

In recent years, millions of businesses are using popular CMS systems like Wordpress and Joomla!. These have become easy targets for hackers. We have cleaned hundreds of these sites over the last 10 years, we see the common trends and technics they use to try and hide their evil deeds. We can often fix a site within a few hours, saving you time, reducing your stress levels and potentially keeping you off the blacklists.

Website security is simply about making the deterrent larger than the motivation. Hacking large firms is usually motivated by politics, religion or money, so they need very large deterrents. Hacking small business websites is more often about practise, spamming and phishing.

Small businesses always have less security and are not as closely monitored as the larger sites, so they are often used to relay spam or deliver phishing software that attacks larger sites like banks, for example. Placing the phishing software on someone elses site, hides the hacker's intentions and actions.

Why do you have to act fast?

The issue for you as a business owner is landing on a blacklist. As soon as Google or any of the thousands of search engines, browsers or directories register that your site is sending spam or phishing, you'll be blacklisted. And, that looks like this

Not great for business and not easy to reverse. If you are unsure whether your site or IP is on a blacklist, you can look it up here - http://blacklistalert.org.

Blacklisting also wreaks havoc with your search engine rankings. Google obviously doesn't want to list hacked sites. So, if you manage to remove the hack and prove to the blacklist that you have cleaned your site, you then need to demonstrate to Google that you are no longer on any blacklists. This can take significant time and a lot of effort and can have some long last effects on your rankings.

If a hacked page is left long enough for Google to index, you may have this appearing in the Google results.

Unless you actually sell Viagra, this is not good for business.

If you are hacked, act immediately to remedy the situation before you end up on a blacklist. Email [email protected] or call 1300 228 100