An unfortunate down side to having any website is that unscrupulous hackers will try to break in and add their own pages or try to hijack your site for their own ends; normally to promote pornography, fake medicines or to host the site to infect other peoples pc’s with viruses and/or to steal credit card or bank details.

Popular sites and blogs are a common target though any site can be effected, its important to keep your software up to date and to keep an eye out for any strange symptoms on your website or statistics.

Common symptoms of a site being hacked include:

Your site runs out of bandwidth or is using a lot more than it normally does – this is normally a sign that the site is being used to host pirated videos or mp3’s

1. Your traffic from search engines like Google drops
2. Your domain name www.example.com “www.example.com” does
   not show up in search engines.
3. The site stops working – often this is because the hackers are
   incompetent as well as criminal and may have crashed the blog software
4. Pornographic or Viagra related terms start appearing in your
   search logs/ Google analytics

A quick way of checking if a wordpress blog has been hacked is to ‘view source’ option on your internet browser and if the site has been hacked you will see a large number of suspicious links which have been hidden

This is an clean example of the links hackers try to add to blogs – notice the way they try to hide the links by using

style=”display:none”

<u style=’display:none’><a

href=”http://rubishsite.com/Social/post.php?p=7-888″>Samsung A300e Ringtones</a> <a href=”http://rubishsite.com/Social/post.php?p=7-24690″>V60i Ringtones Free</a> <a href=”http://rubishsite.com/Social/post.php?p=7-30165″>Motorola V120 Ringtones</a> <a href=”http://rubishsite.com/Social/post.php?p=7-21516″>Free Lg Mobile Ringtone</a> <a href=”http://rubishsite.com/Social/post.php?p=7-10348″>Free Reggaeton Ringtones</a> <a href=”http://rubishsite.com/Social/post.php?p=7-6339″>Hava Nagila Ringtone</a> <a href=”http://rubishsite.com/Social/post.php?p=7-9629″

>Monophonic

Ringtones For Motorola C115</a> <a

href=”http://rubishsite.com/Social/post.php?p=7-4802″>Low Rider Ringtones</a> <a href=”http://rubishsite.com/Social/post.php?p=7-9818″>Cingular Nokia 3560 Ringtones</a> <a href=”http://rubishsite.com/Social/post.php?p=7-23917″>Mobile Phone Ringtone For Samsung E700</a> <a href=”http://rubishsite.com/Social/post.php?p=7-15154″>Free Amr Diab Ringtones</a> <a href=”http://rubishsite.com/Social/post.php?p=7-2230″>Free Inuyasha Ringtone</a>

You also need check the footer and header files of your blogs theme to see if anything has been added, as some sophisticated attackers stop the ‘view source’ method of detecting the addition of illicit links.

THUK Media can help sites recover from hacking attacks like this, and with the process of recovering from any penalties the search engines may have applied contact the us here