How To Get Your Hacked Website Back? | Web Development Services

Has this ever happened to you that one day, you woke up, tried to access your website, and bam, it was hacked?! If not, you are extremely lucky! But if the answer is yes, then you’d definitely know how devastating it feels. There are plenty of owners with absolutely no idea how to get their website back after seeing it go into someone else’s hands. But this is no big deal. There are plenty of web development services providers that can help you get your website back!

But it’ll come at a significant cost. One that small business owners more often than not can’t afford.

In such a case, you’ll need to take a few basic steps to try and get your website back by yourself. Let’s see what those steps are.

Take it Offline

The first and foremost thing to do when your website gets hacked is taking it offline immediately. Then replace your site with a simple maintenance page, hosted on a completely different server. After that, turn off your server to keep it from making any incoming and outgoing connections as it makes the server vulnerable to attacks. Turning off will prevent it from interacting with malicious scripts that may come from outside of your network.

Get to The Bottom of The Problem

After successfully turning off the server, you need to find out the loophole.

To figure out where things went wrong.

This is very crucial because if you can’t figure out how someone took control of your app, there’s no way you’ll be able to keep it from happening again. Some of the things to base your search on should be:

• .htaccess files
• PHP code in files without .php file extensions
• PHP code newly installed WordPress or other CMS plugins

This is a very simple list and gives you a great platform to start.

Create Backups

Another strategy top web app development companies deploy to unhack a website is creating backups. This enables you to recreate the snapshot of the system before the hacking occurred and helps with conducting investigations in case of a serious attack on your website.

Another advantage of creating backups is that it allows you an offline access to the log files which help you spot what went wrong, and whether there were any behavioral inconsistencies before the event came to notice.

Set up A New Server

After creating backups, you need to set up a new server and reinstall the operating system. The main reason for doing this is the fact that it helps to eradicate the compromised sections of the application. Besides, a few security checks along with OS reinstall will ensure that there are potentially no security loopholes left in the system.

Once you have spotted the problem, try to fix it to keep your server safe from future attacks.

Deploy the fresh Source Code

Now that you have created backups, set up new servers, and fixed the problem, its time to deploy fresh source code from your repository, provided that it wasn’t the cause of the attack. That way, you’ll be putting a safe copy of your code to the new server which will keep the attacker from regaining access to your site.

Restore The Database

The last step before you can finally relaunch the website is restoring the database and changing user passwords. It is essential to send emails to your audience, explaining what happened and apologizing for the break in service. This is to maintain the trust factor between your business and clientele.

After successfully performing all the aforementioned steps, voila! Your website is ready to relaunch without any web application development company’s assistance.

Congrats!