New Tool To Help Fight Web Site Hackers

Today, I released a new open source, free tool that will hopefully help everyone in the fight against having their sites hacked. Here’s the info on the MonitorHackdFiles tool.

We all hear about how often people’s sites get hacked. This tool won’t stop that from happening, but here’s what it *will* do.

Let’s say a hacker places some malicious code in either some existing files on your site, or in new files on your site. Regardless of which method he used, he got in and accomplished his goal. Now, unbeknownst to you, your site is either:

1) serving hidden links to unsavory places
2) or redirecting just search users to unsavory sites that is then infecting those users’ computers with malware
3) or some other equally nefarious thing.

Either way, you’re site is toast, even if it looks perfectly normal to the naked eye. You may have no idea anything has happened until one day (maybe weeks later) you realize that you’ve been kicked out of Google’s SERPs (search listings).

Now you frantically start trying to find out why, and maybe, if you’re lucky, you realize you’ve been hacked. Then you have to begin the process of finding the files with the malicious code. Good luck with that!

That’s the basic problem. My new tool will help with that problem to some extent.

What it won’t do…it won’t prevent the attack. There are other things you should be doing/using to help win that battle. But if you lose that battle, and the attack happens, my tool kicks into gear.

My tool, called MonitorHackdFiles, is like a sentry for your site. It watches your site, and when it detects a file has changed (or been added), it notifies you via email and tells you which file(s) was changed. Now you know very quickly that you’ve been attacked, and you can react just as quickly. Now you can take whatever measures are needed to lock the site down, and with luck, you’ll avoid ever having that malicious code show its ugly face to Google, other search engines, or users.

It’s entire goal is to watch and notify. What you do with the information is entirely up to you. But what you don’t know, CAN hurt you.