How To Restore Your Website If It Is Hit By A Chinese Spam Malware Attack?

 

Developing Your Website

Setting up your website requires one to put in a lot of hard work, effort, and money. Just imagine, after going through all the stages of your website development, you wake up one fine day and find out that your website has been hacked- sounds like a nightmare, right? But, this can happen to anyone!

Even just the thought of it can be very frustrating, now imagine experiencing this in real life. This is that time when one cannot think straight due to the stress and anxiety caused by the situation.

Hacking is an ambiguous term that is used to describe any unauthorized access to one’s system for all the wrong reasons. One such way of hacking is through malicious software. The spam malware attack can be a deadly hacking attack on your website.

Hacking Indicators For Your Website

Sometimes, it might be a false hacking alarm; sometimes there can be issues with the hosting services too which cause your website to be down.

To be sure that your website has been hit by a spam malware attack, you must look for the following indicators:

• Website being disabled by the host
• Visitors complaining of strange activity
• Your website is used to attack other websites
• Unauthorized new users noticed with full access to your website
• Search engines have blacklisted your website
• Website has been flagged for distributing malware

What To Do After Your Website Has Been Hit?

Once you are sure that your website has been hit by spam malware, you should do the following:

1.Stay Calm

This is the first thing you must do- stay calm. This would allow you to think straight and take the necessary next steps accordingly.

It is a very frustrating and stressful moment, but you cannot let this cloud your thoughts, and you must get down to try to recover your website.

2.Monitor What You See

You must jot down all the strange behavior you notice on your website, along with the times, if applicable.

You must also try to track why this behavior has started happening; was a new plugin or a new theme installed?

All these factors help you to come up with the incident report, which will come in handy for the professional organization, or you when you try to retrieve your website.

3.Scan Your Website And Local Environment

Scanning your website will help in providing you a clearer picture of the root cause of the attack. This can be done with the help of crawlers and plugins.

Malware attacks can also occur due to attacks on your laptop, computer, etc.

4.Finding And Removing The Malware Attack

This is the most daunting and challenging task of all. This requires some technical know-how and is better if you leave it up to the experts.

They can surely help you to find the root cause and help you get rid of it too, that too, in much lesser time than you doing it on your own.

You might be tempted to restart again, but the best approach would be to remove certain elements of the website that do not disturb the core of your website.

How To Prevent Future Attacks

Once your website has been successfully recovered, you must implement the following without any delay:

• Reset All Access

All the accounts that have access to your website must all reset their passwords and opt for strong passwords.

• Improve Access Controls

Resetting passwords to stronger passwords is just not enough; you must add another layer of protection. This could be the two-factor or multi-factor authentication system.

• Create A Backup

Since this has happened once does not mean that it cannot happen again; you should be prepared for the worst yet again. Thus, the smartest thing to do would be to create a backup of your website.

Creating regular backups of your database and files should help you tackle this situation if it were to ever happen again.

• Installing Plugins

Plugins are an integral part of adding to the functionality of your website and cannot be omitted. While installing plugins, you must ensure that the plugins you install are from authentic and well-known developers.

 

Final Thoughts

Website development can be a challenging task for someone who has no technical knowledge.

Therefore, hiring experts for this job would be a smart idea, as they would help you in creating backups for your website which might be required during an unforeseen attack on your website.

They will choose the best hosting services for you and will guide you regarding anti-virus software too.

One such cooperative team of professionals is DigAptics,who provide their clients with all web development solutions. You must contact themto discuss your website requirements and more with a team representative.