My website has been hacked, what do I do?

You may find your domain gets compromised at some point, this guide goes over how to proceed in that situation. 

We advise that you begin the process of removing / cleaning these files as soon as possible, patching and securing the PHP code and applications or plugins, and resetting FTP / admin passwords.

If you are not familiar with cleaning a compromised website, then you may need to get someone to look into it on your behalf. If the site is a Wordpress-built site, you can email help@blacknight.com requesting our in-house web developers to have a look, and they may be able to provide a quote for cleaning the site should the work be viable. 

Another option would be to restore a clean version of the site from a backup. If you have a backup plan already on your hosting account with us, you may be able to restore the site from there. If not, our Acronis backup plans can be added to any of the current hosting offerings on our newer control panel (https://cp.blacknighthosting.com), and can provide you access to up to 60-days worth of historic restore points depending on the level of plan you purchase: https://www.blacknight.com/sitebackup/

Alternatively, our engineers can check our internal disaster-recovery backups for an available restore point. If you decide to go ahead with such a backup, you should bear in mind that all it does is restore the domain to an earlier version and won't remove whatever weakness allowed it to be compromised, so you'd still need to ensure the application is up to date, along with any plugins/themes/modules it may be using. If you are still interested, then e-mail help@blacknight.com asking for a backup of the website files and databases and specifying a date you would like it to be restored from and we can check. Such a restore would carry a €50 ex VAT restore fee if a suitable backup is located.

Most compromises occur due to out of date applications or out of date plugins/modules/themes the application uses. For that reason it is imperative that you keep your websites up to date to avoid a disruption of service. Prevention is better then a cure.