Will website owners be punished for being hacked? This is a question that has been asked many times by website owners, law enforcement, ISP networks, hosts, and the list really goes on and on. How much responsibility do you have as a website owner? Luckily as of 2016, you are safe. There has not been one conviction or lawsuit against a site owner that was hacked. With that said, there are repercussions you should take into note. ISPs have strict rules with websites that have been hacked and require an investigation in most cases before re-opening the website. These investigations are fast and are normally settled within 48 hours if the proper information is supplied. The information needed is why the hack happened and what was done to secure the security risk.
The most common websites that get hacked are WordPress websites. These sites use PHP an active website code that allows external code to change the page. WordPress supplies update every couple of months to keep it safe. This means if you keep your WordPress up to date and do not have a plug-in or template that is not safe you will not have an issue. Unfortunately, this means you need to check your WordPress often to see if an update is available. Our easy-to-use App Installer in the CPanel auto updates WordPress so you don’t need to worry about security risks if you use this to add WordPress.
There are also auto-update plug-ins if you installed WordPress manually.
If your site is hacked, we suggest removing the whole site and adding a new one with none of the PHP files used on the previous site. This is needed because besides that hack the hacker can make any PHP file a backdoor to get back in. Removing the hacked files rarely fixes the entire issue. You can reuse the database and any media files like images and videos. Be careful re-adding folders, hackers like to drop new files in folders that wouldn’t check to get access again. For example, the media folders are a prime target for this.
The safest way to have a website that cannot be hacked is to have an HTML-based website. With HTML 5 and Java, almost all website needs can be made without PHP.