In interacting with people about hacked websites one of the things that comes up frequently is people conflating security companies trying to take advantage of them with a belief that their websites haven’t really been hacked. A lot of the blame for this resides with the security companies that are trying to take advantage of people (and look to be very successful at it) and others that help enable that, which includes their business partners and government entities that don’t take any action against them. But some of the blame has to be placed on customers of these services that seem to take a completely uncritical view of these services, as among other things, their funding of these companies allows the companies to expand and take advantage of more people.
As an example of that, we had someone contact us recently after they ran across a post we had written how the web host Bluehost was continuing to try to sell SiteLock services based on claims that were made in phishing emails meant to look like they came Bluehost support. The situation this person had was very different than that.
They had been contacted by a company informing them that their website was being used for phishing. Their web host, Bluehost, which is a SiteLock partner, had suspended their account for the same issue. They said they were “shocked” because they had SiteLock on the account and they thought that with that the website wouldn’t have been able to be hacked.
As company that deals in the field we obviously have a very different view of things, but it still is hard to understand a view like that when you consider that SiteLock and every other similar company we have run across don’t provide evidence that their services are effective at protecting websites. To us that seems like a baseline before purchasing any service like that, but clearly it isn’t.
The next part of the story is something that we have heard plenty of times before, but it still doesn’t make much sense to us. That being that they were then told they would need a higher level of SiteLock service to protect against the issue from happening again. To us that raises what seem to be some obvious questions, like why would SiteLock by their own admission be selling security services that don’t actually provide security. Another one would be why would at that point people still not expect some evidence to presented as to the effectiveness of the services considering SiteLock have just admitted that they are selling services that don’t actually work.
When we had responded explaining about that lack of evidence that SiteLock services are effective (along with plenty of evidence to the contrary that we have run across) and that SiteLock’s own marketing indicates that they are not even attempting to provide real security the response from the person was not concern with SiteLock’s practices, but that the whole situation seemed suspicious. We asked about the evidence presented that the website had been using for phishing, but the person seemed uninterested in actually checking over things. Based on past experience our guess is that the website was actually hacked in this case.
Dealing With a Possibly Hacked Website
While in this case we guess the website had actually been hacked, we have run into plenty of instances where SiteLock and their web hosting partners are falsely claiming that websites have been hacked. So what we recommend you do in that situation is get a second opinion on their claim. We are always happy to provide that for free and would hope that other reputable security companies (to the extent that there are any) would do the same.
If the website is hacked what you want done is to have it properly cleaned up, which involves cleaning up the hack, securing the website (which usually mainly involves getting the software up to date), and trying to determine how the website was hacked and fix that. If a service doesn’t do those things (as is true of SiteLock’s main services) then you stand a decent chance of having continuing issues. After things have been cleaned, instead of paying for a security service that won’t protect your website, you should make sure to do the basics to keep your website secure from most issues.
A Better Alternative to SiteLock For Cleaning Up a Hacked Website
If your web host is pushing you to hire SiteLock to clean up a hacked website, we provide a better alternative, where we actually properly clean up the website.