How to Fix a Hacked Joomla Website

Root Out Hacked Files and Get Back on Your Feet

Do you have that pit in your stomach because you're seeing signs the your Joomla website might be hacked? Sometimes it's obvious like your homepage being defaced by someone calling themselves "Hmei7", but often it's more subtle like an attack where traffic from Google is re-routed to pharma websites.

Dealing with a hacked site can derail all your other plans because it requires your immediate attention to stop the damage caused by the attack. It's an enormous pain in the butt and recovering from the hack is a daunting undertaking. Fortunately, there is help!

This guide will take you step-by-step through what you need to do in order to get your site back on its feet and safe and secure.

Who is This Guide For?

This guide is written for the above average technical user: webmasters, developers, web designers, and web savvy do-it-yourself types. Like much in life, it does take some skill to do many of the steps.

However, even if you are not very technical there are a few ways this guide can help you:

  • It can inform you about the likelihood of whether your website has been compromised.
  • It can explain the damage caused by having a hacked site.
  • It will give you a few things that you can do that may overwrite the hacked files and right the ship (this won't be the best solution, but is a decent interim solution until you have someone take a look at it.)
  • It will explain what a blacklist is, what it means to you, and how to get your site off a blacklist.

What Does it Cover?

I will walk you through the following:

Who Wrote This?

John Hooley

Before we dive in though, I'd like to introduce myself: I'm John Hooley, the owner of Blue Bridge and a Zend certified engineer with over eight years experience working with Joomla and recovering many hacked Joomla sites. I'm going to condense my experiences down into the following seven sections to take you from stress and head scratching to confidence in your site security.

Ready to get started?  The Anatomy of a Hacked Joomla Website

John Hooley
President, Steward

John is a graduate of 10,000 Small Businesses, a certified Customer Acquisition Specialist, and a Zend Certified Engineer. He speaks and writes on connecting digital strategy to association goals. Outside of work he's an avid traveler, climber, diver, and a burgeoning sailor. He also volunteers with Rotary and Big Brothers Big Sisters.

Fix a Hacked Joomla Website