My website was hacked - help - Webmaster General forum at WebmasterWorld

Forum Moderators: phranque

Message Too Old, No Replies

My website was hacked - help

I think my website was hacked, and it might affect my Google rankings

killua

9:16 am on Sep 18, 2010 (gmt 0)

My website was hacked this week - the .htaccess was modified and the main pages were modified with many spam links at the bottom.

I was able to repair my website - restored my original .htaccess and all the main pages, and removed the .php file that was added by the hacker. This took me 24 hours to clean everything.

Now my problem:

I noticed that in some search engines and especially Google, keywords like "how to make alternator" "yahoo problems" "how to install crysis warhead" etc. are appearing in my statistics and showing in search engines with my domain name something like this: www.domain.com/UJTBiuw/ Notice the garbled letters directory

However, these garbled directories are not in my website.

Question:
1. Will my search engine rankings going to be affected?
2. Why are those spam links showing on search engines with my domain name? Was there a file I did not erase?
3. Have any of you encountered this kind of hack?

Future

10:41 am on Sep 18, 2010 (gmt 0)

appears like the spammers have modified some internal/external links to your original pages.
if you have made sure, that you cleaned the wrong work, give bots some time to fix this problem.

phranque

10:13 am on Sep 19, 2010 (gmt 0)

as long as all those indexed pages (that were added by the hack) are now returning a 404 Not Found or even better a 410 Gone response you should be ok.

assuming you have actually restored the site to pre-hacked condition and fixed whatever vulnerability allowed the hack to occur, you might consider using GWT to remove those urls.

these google resources should have some useful information for you:

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: My site's been hacked - now what?:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-sites-been-hacked-now-what.html [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com]

Remove a page or site from Google's search results - Webmaster Tools Help:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164734 [google.com]

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: URL removal explained, Part I: URLs & directories:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/url-removal-explained-part-i-urls.html [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com]

killua

11:38 am on Sep 19, 2010 (gmt 0)

Yes, they are all returning 404s immediately after I cleaned my site. I was just surprised that Google crawled many of them during the 24 hours that my site was hacked.

It's impossible to remove the URL's in Google search since they all appear randomly. I only spot some of them through statcounter that I'm using, and some are still appearing but they are all 404s.

enigma1

11:20 am on Sep 25, 2010 (gmt 0)

3. Have any of you encountered this kind of hack?

I've seen many people having the same problem. There are 2 things to watch for. First if you are surfing with the browser securely, that means you only allow scripting from sites you really trust and your system is clean. Second to ensure the application you run for your site, is secure (for instance having a separate admin folder for your site is locked down with your host's cpanel pass-protect, doesn't have known vulnerabilities, you're aware of application updates with respect to security etc.