There are certain things which give away the fact that your Zen Cart website may have been the victim of a hack. Some of the tell-tale signs are given below:
- You suddenly cannot login to your Zen Cart control panel.
- The “Password Forgotten” link does not send you a new password.
- The admin login box may have moved further down the web page than it used to be.
- Are you receiving orders but payments into your Pay Pal account have stopped?
- Are your customers complaining that whenever your website emails them they are also getting information about Male Potency drugs?
In the case of the first 3 bullet points there amy be other reasons for this behaviour, but if more than one of these points apply to your website then you had better start treating it as though you may have been hacked and take appropriate precautions.
If you are receiving orders but no payments into your Pay Pal account then it may be the case that as part of a hack the Pay Pal email address which payments go to has been changed to one owned by the hacker.
As for the final bullet point – if that is happening then there’s no doubt – your site has been hacked!
It goes almost without saying that if you try to go to your Zen Cart control panel or website and your anti-virus software flags up that your site contains Malware then you have definitety been hacked.
The nature, extent and purpose of these hacks vary.
One type will plant a Trojan virus on your website, which will not necessarily harm your site, but will harm the PC of anyone visiting your site who doesn’t have a good anti-virus shield operating on their PC.
In the case of the changed Pay Pal email address then the motive is financial – they steal your money.
Hackers may also activate the Credit Card module which comes bundled with a default install of Zen Cart, and thereby be able to get your customers to enter their credit/debit card details which then get sent on to the hackers.
So, if your site has been hacked what do you do?
Well, the first thing you do is put your site “Down For Maintenance”. If you cannot access your Zen Cart control panel to do that then you can do it by accessing the database via phpMyAdmin. This will not stop the hacker getting in if they already have access, but it will stop customers from using your site and getting into trouble as a result.
You can use this article to reset your Zen Cart control panel User Name and Password using phpMyAdmin:
Zen Cart Tutorial on resetting User Name and Password
What do you do next? You follow the link below to the Zen Cart site which tells you what you must do to recover from the hack:
Recovering From Hacks
This post is quite long enough now and I don’t want to overload you with information, but I will add to it over the coming days.
Rhea
My question is this, might be a blonde one but here goes:
How do people hack into your site/account in the first place?
Bit of a big topic so I recommend to read “Essential PHP Security” by Chris Shiflet from the O’Reilly series: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Essential-PHP-Security-Chris-Shiflett/dp/059600656X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1273646287&sr=8-1. It’s a bit old, but still very relevant and gives a good intro to the various methods of hacking (and preventing hacks) on sites.