Warning: If you suspect your website has been compromised, act quickly but calmly. many successful recoveries start with clear, methodical detection followed by containment and restoration.
Understand: A website compromise can look like many things, from overt defacement and spam injection to subtle data exfiltration or hidden cryptocurrency miners. this guide walks through seven practical checks you can run right away to assess whether your site has been hacked and what to do next.
Why it matters: The real cost of an undetected compromise
Consider: A hacked website is more than an embarrassing banner or a few spam links. it risks customer data, search engine reputation, email deliverability, and your hosting relationship. attackers can embed backdoors that let them come back later, use your site to phish visitors, or add code that mines cryptocurrency and exhausts resources.
Remember: The longer a compromise remains undetected, the higher the chance of permanent damage, lost backups, leaked credentials, or downstream harm to users. early detection sharply reduces cleanup time and cost.
Check 1: Google search console and "security issues"
Check: If you haven't already, register your site with google search console (gsc) and confirm ownership. gsc includes a "security issues" panel that reports malware, social engineering, and hacked content detected by google's crawlers.
Tip: gsc often provides example URLs and infected snippets. even if the report is sparse, treat a security alert as high priority, google will sometimes suppress search listings and show warnings to users before you notice traffic drops.
How to use it
Action: Open search console ? security & manual actions ? security issues. follow the remediation links, then request a review after you clean the site.
Check 2: Google safe browsing & third-party site reputation checks
Verify: Google safe browsing maintains a blocklist used by browsers. several public tools let you query whether your domain appears in that database; if your domain is listed, visitors will see red warnings in chrome, firefox, and safari.
Also: Use multiple reputation tools (for example, site scanners, "isitdown" pages, or web malware checkers) because each scanner has slightly different signatures and heuristics. a clean result on one scanner doesn't guarantee safety, use a small battery of checks.
Check 3: Visible site behavior, defacement, redirects, and odd UI
Look: Walk through your site as a new visitor would, using an incognito window or a machine that doesn't have admin cookies. look for unexpected banners, popups, forced downloads, or content that doesn't belong to you.
Read the entire article inside the Is it hacked blog: https://isithacked.com/blog/is-my-site-hacked-7-wa...