Why restoring a hacked website from your backup is not the best idea ?

The first thought that most likely will come to an inexperienced website owner’s mind is, “Why would I bother myself with fixing my website after hacker’s attack, if I can simply restore it from the backup?”

Indeed, the easiest way is the tempting one. It’s hard to convince yourself that it will be better to spend more energy If I can just return to the previous version. To the version, that  was working “fine”. It’s simple to be stuck with an illusion of safety. But there’s the thing – your website was not fine.

If someone was able to hack your website once, you will not be able to protect it from additional attacks by going to your backup. If someone hacked you, it means there are vulnerability in your website’s protection. And you can be almost 100% sure that you will suffer from hacker’s attacks again and again. After all, by restoring the latest version from a backup you can’t improve the protection of your website. Moreover, you are giving a chance to that person who hacked you to come back and cause much more damage to your website. Best case scenario – you will be stuck in this vicious circle forever: attack-backup-attack-backup. Is this what you want? We doubt that.

So, what should you do if your website is hacked

First of all, you should turn to a professional team to deal with that problem. Your website has to be cleaned from any and all harmful viruses and malicious codes. Our experienced team of professionals will rapidly bring your site back to life. So you shouldn’t worrie about  time spent on cleaning and fixing your website.

Then you should think about further protection. To ensure your website’s safety you can use the CWIS antivirus. It will protect your website from viruses. Also, it will help you to find malware and malicious codes and get rid of it.

Last but not least is discovering the vulnerabilities your website has. Ideally, website’s protection should have no security gapes. It’s better to prevent an attack, right?

Hopefully, we gave a good explanation on why you shouldn’t just restore a website from your backup after it was hacked.

Now let’s go through some of the popular myths

1. You can avoid being blacklisted if you just forbid Google to index the robots.txt file.

This is a bad, really bad idea. First of all, there is a chance that the search engine will still be able to index your website. Also, this action will remove the website from search, and it’s not the best thing for a business. Just focus on cleaning and repairing.

2. If scanning results show some infected files, it is better to delete them

Both important and malicious files can contain some similar fragments so a scanner can slip up. In this situation you will need to inspect every suspicious file.

3. It’s better and cheaper to hire some random freelancer. He will clean the hacked website

Foremost, a random freelancer will probably lacks in experience. You can never be sure that this person will do everything right. Inexperienced “specialists” can do more harm to your website than the virus itself. Also, it is really risky to trust some random person with all the information of your website.

4. I can just check and clean all of the needed files every day

Do you enjoy this process? Isn’t it easier and more efficient to check the protection and fix all vulnerabilities? You will need to do this just once.

5. Using a simple desktop antivirus to check the backup file for viruses

No, it’s not  sufficient. Desktop and specialized antiviruses have different databases because viruses on your computer differ from viruses on your website. There is no chance that a desktop antivirus will find infected files on the website.

In conclusion, you should never underestimate hackers. They evolve every day and their methods become more and more sophisticated. Always think in advance about the protection of your website.