6 service to help you fix hacked Joomla site

Among the popular content management systems (CMS), Joomla is known for its security features and robustness.

However, using Joomla to build and manage your website does not guarantee that it will not be hacked. No matter how much effort you put into securing your website, there will always be a vulnerability that you are not aware of, one that opens a door for hackers to break into and steal your beloved content.

Joomla sites can be hacked in many ways. First of all, the server hosting of your website can be insecure. Many vulnerabilities can be exploited in a server, e.g. E.g. weak credentials, unprotected DNS services, open ports, and many others.

One unfortunately common usage is using the default admin account with a weak password that can be brute force obtained. Another reason is the failure to update the Joomla core system or installed plugins or templates.

Joomla's open architecture is great for the flexibility it offers but comes with a potential risk as you can use unsafe extensions. Finally, a threat is common to all websites, regardless of the underlying technology: it could become the target of phishing attacks.

To sum up, your Joomla site may get hacked no matter what. The next question you might be asking is: how do I know if my website has been hacked and what are the consequences?

The problem of maintaining a hacked website

If you frequently scan your Joomla website for malware, there's a good chance you'll spot a hacking attempt before it sweeps the entire site. But if you don't do this, the symptoms that your website has been hacked will appear in the form of altered web pages with messages, links, images, or ads that you didn't place there, or redirects to websites that don't belong to you.

You should also suspect your site has been hacked if you notice subtle changes in behavior, such as B. automatically logging out of your administrator account, detecting the appearance of new administrator names, unexpectedly high website traffic, or slow loading of web pages.

You may think that these symptoms are superficial and that strange messages or images won't hurt your business. Don't believe that. Every hacking symptom IS harmful in many ways. First of all, it can affect your positioning in SERPs (search engine results pages). Search engines - especially Google - check the websites they crawl to see if they're safe for regular users. If they detect that your site has been hacked, they will display an alert along with the site metadata and also lower your SERP rankings in favor of other pages with similar content that have not been hacked.

Aside from damaging your SEO and your website's reputation as a legitimate business front end, the consequences of hacking a website can also include putting your customers' or your users' private information at risk. A hacking attack such as cross-site scripting could redirect your visitors to any location the hackers want. These visitors then lose trust in your website forever.

So my Joomla site got hacked. What now?

You have two options: hire a service to do the cleaning for a fee, or do the cleaning yourself. If you're a DIY enthusiast, make a glass of coffee ☕ and prepare for some serious cleaning by doing follow the steps below.

• Make a full backup. This backup contains traces of malware, but you should still keep it in a quarantine folder on your local computer if you need to find a file or content that is nowhere else.
• Run a full site scan. Use an online tool for this task and use your local antivirus program to detect infected files in the backup copy created in step 1. If the antivirus program detects infected files, these files should be deleted from backup and hosting.
• Put the website in offline mode. You can do this from the Joomla backend, via FTP, or simply by modifying the .htaccess file on your server to only allow access from your IP address.
• Run a manual scan. Using FTP and your trained eye, browse the directory structure to find and delete rogue files. In particular, look for malicious files disguised as legitimate files in folders like /tmp, /cache, or /images - some common examples: are test.html, tests.php, contacts.php, cron.css, and css.php. If you find a file that doesn't belong in the folder it's on, delete it without thinking.

If you are unsure whether the full site scan you performed in Step 2 cleaned infected code files, your manual scan should include scanning PHP files for malicious code. Note that this code could be obfuscated or escaped by functions such as base64_decode, gzinflate, eval, or other regular expression-related functions. You can use a PHP decoder or online service to analyze obfuscated code to reveal what it's doing.

• Change all passwords and delete malicious users. First, change the password of your Joomla superuser account and all passwords for accounts with administrator rights on the website. In your hosting panel, change the database password and update it in the configuration files (configuration.php). Do the same with the FTP password.
• Update your Joomla installation to the latest version, along with all plugins and templates. Using the Extension Manager, compare each extension's version number to the information on the developer's website. If there are extensions you don't use, delete them.
• Restore your reputation. If you've already run out of coffee, consider making another glass. This step is less technical but will take more time.

If your website was hacked long before you cleaned it, chances are it was blacklisted. This means it will not show up in search results to protect users from potential malware infections and therefore you will stop receiving visitors and lose your trust. Even if you cleaned your website thoroughly, it would still be blacklisted for a few days.

Read Also: 5 Quick Steps to Remove Malware from WordPress

To speed things up, use Google's Search Console to request a review once your site is clean and working properly. Google will scan your website and if no malware infections are found, it will no longer display a warning message next to your website's metadata. You'll have to wait a few more days for that to happen. You can also access the URL removal tool from Search Console to request the removal of the index from Google for any URLs added by malicious hands.

After cleaning your website, take the necessary measures to prevent future attacks, such as B. Regularly scanning your website for malware infections.

Hack Repair Services

The steps listed above could serve as a DIY guide for you to recover your website after a hack attack. But if you don't have the time or don't feel confident enough to do the job, you can hire an expert to fix the hacked Joomla site. It will cost you, but the time you save could be worth the investment. Remember that your website is offline every minute

— or worse, online but losing reputation — could mean losing dollars.

Here's a list of services you might consider if you need to get your website back on track FAST.

Sucuri

If you have to pay to have your website repaired, you might want to take the opportunity to hire a service that does more. It may cost you more, but you will have peace of mind in return.

Sucuri offers a $499.99 per year prepaid plan that guarantees a 6-hour response if you need to fix a hacked website quickly. Once your site is fixed, you get one year of continuous protection without paying any additional fees. There are cheaper plans if you can wait more than 6 hours for your website to be fixed. Response times vary, but with any plan, Sucuri's experts will fully sanitize your site.

To fix your website, all you have to do is follow three simple steps: choose the plan that best fits your budget, creates an account, and submit a malware removal request. Sucuri guarantees to put an end to malware, blacklist warnings, hidden backdoors, and SEO spam.

After the work is done, you will receive a full report.

Astra

Minutes after you sign up with Astra, its security researchers start diagnosing your website with sophisticated tools. All infected files are identified and removed to ensure your website is clean again and Astra tools are deployed to prevent future attacks. Astra security experts quickly remove all website malware, blacklists, phishing, defacements, SEO spam, and other issues.

Astra offers three different plans tailored to different needs.

• The Pro plan costs $19 per month and is designed for small business websites. It includes malware cleaning with a 12-hour response time, along with a website firewall, automatic malware scanner, blacklist monitoring, and many more features.
• The Advanced plan costs $89 a month and reduces the malware cleanup response time to 8 hours. It adds an interesting set of features for eCommerce sites and small businesses like B. Quarterly security audits and more than 300 security tests.
• Finally, the Business plan costs $119 per month and is designed for SaaS and big deals. It offers a response time of 6 hours and special features such as business logic tests, managed bug bounty, an account manager, and up to 6 team members.

Fix

Behind the service is Phil E. Taylor, a full-stack PHP developer, and a renowned Joomla expert.

For a one-time fee of £88 or £138 — depending on your Joomla version — Phil and his crew will fix your hacked Joomla site. The fee does not change and there are no additional costs no matter how long it takes to complete the job. They promise to start work immediately if you hire the service within UK office hours. In most cases, the issue is resolved the same day.

To get your website repaired, all you have to do is register, send your website details and pay the fee. After that, you can relax while the experts take care of everything. After repairing your website, you can enjoy additional services such as: Such as securing your website, applying best practices, debugging and fixing PHP error messages, and fixing the white screen of death issues. All of these services are offered for the same one-time fee.

SiteLock

With SiteLock, you can choose between a one-time website cleanup or commissioning a repair and ongoing protection plan. The former costs $199.99 per domain while the latter costs $41.67 per month/domain. SiteLock promises to work 24/7 to get your website back online as soon as possible, with no exceptions.

If you choose the ongoing protection plan, SiteLock implements proactive protection, finding and remediating threats before you know they exist, and keeping your site away from potential bans and blacklists.

Your hosting provider may temporarily block your website if it detects a malware infection in it to prevent it from infecting other websites hosted on the same shared server. If this is the case, SiteLock will work with you and your hosting provider to clean up your website and get it online as soon as possible.

Web357

This service takes a step most un-hacking services overlook: it sets up a temporary branded page while the cleaning experts work on your site. This page lets your visitors know that your site is under maintenance so they don't get an error message and think your site is down.

In 24 hours or less, your website will be fully cleaned and repaired for a one-time fee of $149.00. Once you hire the service, you need to provide administrator credentials and then a specialized team will scan your Joomla site for vulnerabilities and malware both automatically and manually.

They will clean all hacked files, database entries, and backdoors and then update your website's core files, templates, and extensions to the latest versions. They also run a full security scan and submit a Google verification request to remove your site from a blacklist.

Fiverr Service

Mehdi is a Moroccan freelancer with over nine years of experience repairing hacked Joomla sites. He has already helped countless people with their hacked sites through the Fiverr platform.

If you hire Mehdi services, he will remove all existing infections from your website, add a security package, update your Joomla to the latest version, delete warning messages from Google SERPs, fix any security or hacking-related issues and make a full backup of your site. If you need more information, you can message Mehdi and you will receive a response in about an hour.

Mehdi offers a Basic Safe Pack that costs $5 and does a full scan, cleans the site, fixes all permissions, and generates a full report. There is a one-month money-back guarantee. There's also a standard Pro package that costs $25 and offers the same as the basic plan, plus a firewall-installed vulnerability scanning and a two-month warranty. Finally, the Premium Expert Pack costs $50 and adds the ability to fully fix a dead website and update all extensions. The guarantee of this plan is three months.

Turn a crisis into an opportunity

Repairing your Joomla site after being hacked will cost you either money or time. But don't think you won't waste anything - instead, think of it as an investment to improve your site's security. After fixing and securing it, your website will have become more robust and your customers or visitors will have more trust in you and your business.