We received a phone call from a company in Scotland that had just received an email from one of their customers advising that it looked like their website had been hacked. The customer advised that upon viewing the website it showed an insecure connection in their website browser and was diverting them to add their personal information to another website in a foreign language.
Naturally, the company was alarmed to hear this from one of their customers and upon inspection of their website they realised that had indeed been hacked and no longer had access to their website and no way to directly fix the issue. Upon calling their hosting provider, they were also advised to hire an IT security website recovery service or data expert to address the issue as this sat ‘out of scope’ with the hosting provider’s services and not their responsibility.
Needless to say, this left the company in a very difficult situation. Not only were they worried about customers accessing the website but they were also concerned about the data held on the website, which included personally identifiable information about their active clients.
At Tecology we understand the architecture behind WordPress in immense detail and we were glad to receive the phone call and put the client’s mind at rest. We first took the website offline and added a temporary holding screen that the website was down for maintenance and contact details should anyone wish to email/call the client company. We then set about the following tasks to resolve the issue:
This was a complex hack but we could see clearly the source point had come from a free WordPress plugin that contained a flawed code and had provided the access point for the hackers. In this case, the website designer had abandoned the website and was no longer supporting the client with updates and maintenance which led to the website becoming vulnerable over time. The website had also been developed with low-quality WordPress plugins which are known security issues within the expert WordPress community.
If you are ever in this situation please feel free to contact us for a free consultation call and we will work with you to recover your website quickly, efficiently and at minimal cost and downtime to your organisation.
To ensure this never happens to you, we would highly recommend one of our tailored website maintenance plans and we will manage everything related to your website speed, and security on your behalf.
