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How to Recover After Your Site's Been Hacked

So a hacker or competitor has penetrated your site's source code and installed malicious scripts or programs. The first step is to get your site offline (temporarily) as fast as possible so that you don't infect visitors unnecessarily. Speed may be a problem if you're using a shared hosting service, so try using a 503 status code in the meantime, to keep the engine's spiders from crawling. The Google Webmaster Tools URL Removal tool can also help with preventing incoming traffic.

The next step is to figure out what the hacker was after. Was it consumer or employee PII? Was it your proprietary shopping cart script? Check your server logs for any modified, uploaded or otherwise suspicious file activities.

Once you've assessed the situation, reinstall your OS--preferably from a secure, trusted site or disc. After the fresh reinstallation, use the latest backup you have to restore your site--but make sure that the backup is clean and free of compromised content. Change your passwords, and if your site was offline, take the steps to get it back online and work on getting the engines to start indexing it again.

Read the whole story at Google Webmaster Central »

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