Our site was hacked and malware was injected into it. The purpose of the code it seems was to redirect users to a different website. Fortunately it was flagged very early and jumped on. Google marked the page as unsafe in bright red, our web team got alerts and plenty of customers email in about it. Also anyone who has used our link in a review video on YouTube video will have had their video suspended as it is against their policy to have videos linking to sites with malware.

The site was cleaned very quickly and files replaced from the back ups. The site is up and running with no data loss or breaches in user data. We are changing our firewall and also implementing a 2 factor authentication system for users signing up.

However the website still shows a warning page on some browsers. We have submitted a malware review request to Google which means waiting around for them to check the site and then removing the dangerous site flag. All in this may take up to a week for it to disappear which is sadly making us look untrustworthy and could be putting of new customer. I mean - would you want to spend money on a site flagged as dodgy? Very frustrating as it is affecting sales but all we can do is wait and rely on Google to not make us wait too much longer.

One thing that I did learn about is the sheer amount of bot attacks that take place against our website every day! It is a staggering amount and it turns out that this is happening to basically all website all the time. I knew some happened but not all the time. I wonder how much internet traffic world wide is actually made up from malicious code like this. Also it was interesting looking at the security console and seeing where these attacks originated from. Some of the countries are ones you might expect, but it turns out it is basically from everywhere!

Thanks for your patience and support as always.

Chris

It is all good now! Just had a reply from Google that they have finished the review and removed the alerts from the alerts from the page. Everything is back to normal now! 🙂

Chris

Great they could fix it quickly. I hope it didn't hurt your business too much but trust is important, especially in a small market like flightsims.