Hacked Website Cleanup

If your website has been hacked to put malware, spam content, or other malicious content on it, getting it properly cleaned up involves three key components:

  • Cleaning up the hack.
  • Getting the website secured as possible (which usually involves getting any software on the website up to date).
  • Trying to determine how the website was hacked and fix that.
What we have found in being repeatedly brought in to re-clean hacked websites is that many companies out there do not try to complete the latter two of those components. A failure to do those components not only increases the chances of the website being hacked again (hence us being hired to re-clean the websites), but our experience is that the work needed to try to determine how the website was hacked is important to make sure that the hack has been fully cleaned up as well.

While focusing on doing a cleanup as fast as possible is likely to lead to a bad outcome, we can usually clean up the website in a few hours.

Some security companies will try to sell people on paying them an ongoing fee for a protection service instead of properly cleaning up the hack. There several big issues with that:

First, we have yet to find one of these companies provide evidence, much less evidence from independent testing, that their services are effective at protecting websites, which seems like it should be a baseline requirement for any such service.

Second, we have seen plenty of evidence that these services are not effective. That evidence includes people contacting us, asking if we provide such a service that works after using one that didn't work. Another piece of evidence is that they rarely try to determine how the websites they are cleaning up have been hacked, so they wouldn't even know what they should attempt to protect against.

Finally, what we have found is that if you look closely, you find that these companies' idea of protecting websites often doesn't actually involve protecting them, but claiming that they can detect and clean the website after it gets hacked. One problem with that is that not only would it be cheaper to secure the website, but because they don't clean up website properly, it can lead to the website being repeatedly hacked and then repeatedly cleaned, which isn't a good solution.

If you are looking for a company that will properly clean up your hacked website, below are the links to the details of our specialized services for cleaning up websites running a variety of web software:

We also offer a website malware removal service for other types of websites. For websites built on other content management system (CMS), blog, forum, cart, or gallery applications, which have non-malware issues, please contact us to see if we can help you to clean up your website and secure it.