Posted by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead We created a new Help for hacked sites informational series to help all levels of site owners understand how they can recover their hacked site. The series includes over a dozen articles and 80+ minutes of informational videos—from the basics of what it means for a site to be hacked to diagnosing specific malware infection types. “Help for hacked sites” overview: How and why a site is hacked Over 25%!o(MISSING)f sites that are hacked may remain compromised In StopBadware and Commtouch’s 2012 survey of more than 600 webmasters of hacked sites, 26%!o(MISSING)f site owners reported that their site was still compromised while 2%!c(MISSING)ompletely abandoned their site. We hope that by adding our educational resources to the great tools and information already available from the security community, more hacked sites can restore their unique content and make it safely available to users. The fact remains, however, that the process to recovery requires fairly advanced system administrator skills and knowledge of source code. Without help from others—perhaps their hoster or a trusted expert—many site owners may still struggle to recover. StopBadware and Commtouch’s 2012 survey results for “What action did you take/are you taking to fix the compromised site?” Hackers’ tactics are difficult for site owners to detect Cybercriminals employ various tricks to avoid the site owner’s detection, making recovery difficult for the average site owner. One technique is adding “hidden text” to the site’s page so users don’t see the damage, but search engines still process the content. Often the case for sites hacked with spam, hackers abuse a good site to help their site (commonly pharmaceutical or poker sites) rank in search results. Both pages are the same, but the page on the right highlights the “hidden text”—in this case, white text on a white background. As explained in Step 5: Assess the damage (hacked with spam), hackers employ these types of tricks to avoid human detection. In cases of sites hacked to distribute malware, Google provides verified site owners with a sample of infected URLs, often with their malware infection type, such as Server configuration (using the server’s configuration file to redirect users to malicious content). In Help for hacked sites, Lucas Ballard, a software engineer on our Safe Browsing team, explains how to locate and clean this malware infection type. Lucas Ballard covers the malware infection type Server configuration. Reminder to keep your site secure I realize that reminding you to keep your site secure is a bit like my mother yelling “don’t forget to bring a coat!” as I leave her sunny California residence. Like my mother, I can’t help myself. Please remember to: Be vigilant about keeping software updated Understand the security practices of all applications, plugins, third-party software, etc., before you install them on your server Remove unnecessary or unused software Enforce creation of strong passwords Keep all devices used to log in to your web server secure (updated operating system and browser) Make regular, automated backups 