Starting this month Google has announced that they will inform you if you website has potentially been hacked. They will alert you via Google Webmaster Tools if they detect any potential issues that point to a malicious hacker.
Quoting Google from their official Webmaster Central Blog they state;
“Starting this month, we will notify more webmasters of more potential issues we’ve detected on their websites, including:
- Spammy or abused user-generated content
- Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam
- Suspected hacking
These notifications are meant to alert webmasters of potential issues and provide next steps on how to get their sites fixed and back into Google’s search results. If it pertains to a hacking or abuse issue, the notification will point to example URLs exhibiting this type of behavior. These notifications will run in parallel with our existing malware notifications.”
The alert for suspected hacking will look something like this:
Google have also stated that they “may extend this effort even further to include other types of vulnerabilities or abuse issues.”
By default these alerts appear in the ‘messages’ section of Webmaster Tools. You can also set up email forwarding to the email address associated with your account, so that you are informed immediately.
