One thing we webmasters have to worry about is the bad guys looking to install malware on our website. Fortunately, there are sometimes simple things we can do to find out whether we’ve been hacked.
We (the royal we) sometimes say “Google is your friend.” This is true here as well. Suppose your website domain is chasbelov.wordpress.com. Enter the following search:
prescription site:chasbelov.wordpress.com
If you’re lucky, Google will come back with no or one or two hits (unless you’re a pharmacy). But if you’ve been hacked by spammers, you might well come back with 2,000 or more such hits, as a major theatre I Googled yesterday did. No, I wasn’t (initially) looking to see if they were hacked; a drug-related result from their website came up as a result for a search I was doing for some special interest theatre. But once I got that result, I came up with the above search to test how bad their infestation was.
You can set up a notification at http://www.google.com/alerts
This is definitely not the only way hackers can mess with your site, and they can hide it from Google by telling Google not to index the page. But it’s an easy enough check so you might as well do it.
Hope this helps. (And yes, I’ve notified that theatre.)
Tags: security, webmastering, websites
October 16, 2012 at 7:38 pm |
Interesting…more ways to be paranoid…so of course I checked. Clean for now! Huzzah! Thanks for the heads up. So, we should wish that we don;t become popular, so that no one wants to hack our site?
October 16, 2012 at 11:41 pm |
Well, pandas are already popular, so what it means is use a longer password that isn’t 123456 or a dictionary word or one of the 500 most common passwords (not safe for work).
October 17, 2012 at 6:13 am
I make up all my own words. Pandas are a bit paranoid. (it’s a “P” thing) also punctual, persnickity, and personable.