Site Hacked!

Last week our site was hacked, and malware was injected into it. The purpose of the code it seems, was to redirect users to a malicious website. Fortunately, it was flagged to us very early and jumped on. Google marked the page as unsafe, our web team received alerts, and plenty of customers emailed in about it. Also, anyone who has used our link in a review video on YouTube video will have had their video suspended as it is against YouTube policy to have videos linking to sites with malware so this generated some more emails alerting us.

The website was cleaned very quickly, with the malicious code being found and deleted. For further piece of mind all the files were replaced from known clean backups. The site was up and running with no data loss or breaches in user data within a few hours. We also asked the web team to change our firewall and implement a new 2 factor authentication system for users signing up.

However, the website was still showing a warning page on some browsers. We then submitted a malware review request to Google which meant waiting for them to check the site and then remove the dangerous site flag. All this took a few days which is sadly made us look untrustworthy and could be rather off putting for new customers. I mean – would you want to spend money on a site flagged as dodgy? Very frustrating as it was affecting traffic to the site and sales but all we could do was wait. Anyway, on Sunday I got an alert that the site had passed review and Google were removing any malware flags from it so finally everything is as it should be.

One thing that I did learn during this process was about is the sheer number of bot attacks that take place against our website every day! It is a staggering amount, and it turns out that this is happening to basically all websites all the time. I knew some happened, but not all the time. I wonder how much internet traffic worldwide is actually made up from malicious code like this.

Also, it was interesting looking at the security console and seeing where these attacks originated from. Some of the countries are ones you might expect, but it turns out it is basically from everywhere!

Thanks for your patience and support as always.

Chris