Has Your Site Been Hacked?

Video Transcript

This class is going to have a look at a few different tools you can use to see if your site has been compromised.

Now one way that you might suspect your site has been hacked or compromised, is you get an email from a friend telling you that your site looks a little funky. Did you put that flashing green skull and crossbones on your front page, or maybe whenever you go to your site, instead of a normal page, you see something else. For example, one of these big nasty red notices from Google saying your site is containing malware, or this site is dangerous do not enter or something to that effect, not where Google gets these notices from is part of their what’s called Safe Browsing. And if you go to transparency report.google.com, that’ll bring you to this page here, which more than anything else is more statistics. But if we scroll down a bit, there’s links in here to different reports that you can learn more about the different items that Google would search for.

And if finds might slap those big red notices on your site. Like, for example, here under Google Safe Browsing, if we click on that, that’ll bring us to this page here. And there’s a lot of information here. I mean, with Google, you know, those rabbit holes all over the place that before long, you notice that 12 hours have passed. And you’ve been learning a whole lot of stuff. So let’s kind of skip all that for now. And just know that here on the Google Safe Browsing page, which you can go directly here by going to Safe Browsing, Google calm. And if we scroll down, a lot of good stuff appear.

But if you keep on scrolling, keep on scrolling right down here, under malware, click on learn more. And you’ve got a lot of other stuff in here too. But this is what I want to point out, they click on learn more here, that’s going to take you over to the developer page for Google. And if you click on under security, you want to expand that if you click on security, and then click on what is hacking or hacked content, this little right up here and video will give you more insight on what Google sees as compromised content that will in turn help you keep that kind of stuff away from your site that along with all the other bits of information you’ve been learning throughout the previous classes in this course. So this is definitely something you want to spend a few minutes on. Now another tool you might try is a site called is it hacked.com very simple.

Put the URL in here of the site you want to check, of course, you want to concentrate on yours. But if you’re concerned about somebody else’s site, it works the same way, just copy the URL, paste it in here, click on Check your site, a minute or two to scan. Now, this being a brand new site, not a lot of content, I’m kind of expecting these green checkmarks. But it tells you a little bit more about what was being checked. And they even have an option here where you can sign up for free for their monitoring service. Another one pretty popular one too, is security. This is site check.security.net. Unlike with isn’t hacked, calm, you got a box right here, paste the URL in there. And click on scan website. Give you some information here about what was checked.
Ideally, you’re looking for all green. But if we scroll down gives you a lot of information about not just what was checked, but more information about those individual items from different services. And lastly, there’ll be your Google Webmaster Tools, also known as or now known as Google Search Console. Now this does require you to have your site connected to Google Search Console. And if you do, then on your main overview page, if we come on down here a little bit we’ve got in the left sidebar security issues.

Click on that, and it will show you any issues and links to help you get those issues fixed. Well, that’s going to bring us to the end of this class on using a few different online free tools to see if your site has been hacked or compromised. In the next class, we’re going to look at a couple of methods to unhak or clean up our compromised site, a project in this class out and you have a great day