Joomla Resources Compromised? Here’s What You Can Do

Posted by Jamison on 09 11 2016.

As website masters or website owners ourselves, you need to understand how worrisome, even scary having a hacked site is. When a hacker targets your site and renders it inaccessible, you need to act quickly, or you put yourself, your brand, and your website at even greater risk.

Quickly spreading damage

Although all hacked websites require prompt repairs, those who run ecommerce sites should act and resolve their issues even faster. Those spam ads you think nothing of may actually have the power to quickly spread and cause damage throughout the site. You may even end up having a site completely inoperable on all levels.

The longer you wait to repair the damage, the greater the loss you will suffer from.

Drained and diminished credibility

When a visitor attempts to access a hacked site, he/she will encounter a message that goes along the line of “This site may be compromised.” As a web user yourself, you should put yourself in the shoes of your site visitors and think of how you will react when you see such a message. You most likely would never want to go back to that site.

As a result, your site’s credibility and brand image suffers from diminished credibility. Worse, those visitors who saw the message will likely spread the news about it, slowly and gradually killing your credibility.

Don’t risk it: Take care of your hacked Joomla right away

Because of all the potential risks and hazards associated with a hacked website, or Joomla for a more specific example, you should take care of the issue right away.

Here are the steps to perform to resolve this hacked problem:

1. First, have your website go offline, preferably through the htaccess method.
2. Access the forum post assistant as well as the security tool and run them. Joomla makes it easy, as it provides simple-to-understand instructions.
3. Perform a thorough scan on all of your machines equipped with Joomla, Joomla admin access, super admin, and FTP. Make sure the scan covers detection of malware, spyware, virus, and Trojans among several other malicious programs and files.
4. Make you have the latest version of Joomla downloaded for the Joomla series you use on your website.
5. Check the “Vulnerable Extensions List.” This will allow you to determine whether you have any vulnerable extensions. When you do, deal with them immediately.

To complete your hacked issue resolution program, go through all these security steps once again to ensure you completed everything.

Hacking the hackers

In addition to the primary steps mentioned above, you have a few other ways to handle your hacked Joomla.

For instance, you should change all of log in credentials, including the user names and passwords of your Joomla accounts, Joomla! Super Admin, and Joomla! Admin. Do the same for your domains control panel, FTP, and MySQL. Do this regularly, and you can reduce the risks of hackers targeting your online assets.

As final reminders, disable the standard Admin user, delete all your templates and files and replace them with new copies, and get rid of any suspicious photo files, images, and pdf files.