Surviving a blacklisting attempt by Google

Surviving a blacklisting attempt by Google

What does it feel like to have your company's website hacked into by strangers? Some hackers just do it for the trophy value, and don't really end up doing any actual harm. But when they do intend to leave their mark, as it were, replacing the messages and information you painstakingly placed on your website with vandalized messages, it can really feel like a personal blow. But this is a situation that is quite easy to fix after all. What happens after such an attack Google somehow decides to punish you for the attack warning visitors that the website "may harm your computer"?

As awful as that seems, this isn't all that rare a situation. It happens to small companies and also large companies all the time. What is it that makes Google flag you down as chronically unsafe? Usually it isn't just a couple of instances of having hackers barge their way in it is repeated security compromises that do that. And when you are on Google's blacklist, getting off it can be extremely difficult. Consider the case of Gensyslogic , a Taiwanese maker of the WebCams you find in notebook computers. Their website is their main source of contact with their customer base, and it was hacked two times in one month. It made it very difficult for them to keep in touch with the companies they dealt with, and it hurt their reputation, but they felt that they could just beef up security of it and put it behind them until Google noticed what was going on and placed a "this site may harm your computer" stamp on the website. They've been pleading with Google ever since to be taken off the blacklist. To a small company, this kind of loss of reputation can often put them out of business.

Of course everyone really hates Google for punishing them for something that is not really their fault; but Google tries hard to help businesses protect their websites from such a fate. They have plenty of thoughtful features and services on their Webmaster tools webpage that help. Here is a short checklist of their pointers as an example of kind of usable information they have of how a business website could protect itself from attacks.

Study closely at all the plug-ins from external sources that you use on your website. Make sure that your plug-ins come from reputed software companies.

Try the search string site: on Google to see what shows up. If anything seems not familiar, you need to look get suspicious.

If you could get yourself a Google Webmaster ID, you could get notifications about possible weak areas, about new updates for the software you choose, and custom notifications about any suspicious activity on your website. This should give you a heads up before anything heads for serious trouble.

Website development and designing, make sure that you make the server's directory permissions, authentication and encryption all locked and invulnerable.

Make sure that you keep a detailed log of your server's activities. And make sure that you use only SSH and SFTP for data transfers.

Of course, there is always a basic level of protection you need to take complete responsibility for with great firewall software and antivirus. Most companies who get hacked usually have obsolete antivirus and other such problems. Why any business would take a chance with losing out on Google's graces is difficult to say. Especially when it's usually pretty simple to stay ahead of the hackers.

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