A couple of days ago I went to check how the websites a friend and I have been working on together were ranking. I’m hoping to go into more detail regarding this business venture in the near future.
Anyway, to my dismay, I saw that two of our sites had been hacked with malware, and were redirecting to some sort of sweepstakes website. The Google listings for the sites were showing a warning, which if not fixed quickly could be a huge deal, as we’ve been working to get these sites ranking well for months.
It was hard not to panic, as I didn’t know how to fix the hacks, but I held it together pretty nicely.
I emailed my friend and told him what was up. He said he’d take a look around and try to figure it out. He’s much smarter than me with stuff like this.
After a few emails back and forth and far too much time Google searching for a solution, he took a deep look around and found the infected files, and got rid of them.
A sigh of relief, but, the problem was really only half solved.
How do we make sure that this doesn’t happen again? And if it does, what will we do next time so there are no questions, just quick actions to take and solve it quickly?
I don’t want my business partner to have to go into pages and pages of php and look for hidden snippets of code. Nobody likes to do that. It takes too much time and there are better things to do.
We needed a fix that was more systematic – an “Okay, man, ___ has been hacked. Did this and this, and we’re back and put in a site review request to Google. And here’s something I found that could be good for us to work on today…”
So I did some research about the easiest way to fix the issue (minus all the code digging and searching), talked with my friend and we set up a new system that would make things a breeze. We had neglected to do it before. Bad move. But now it’s fixed, and we learned.
Solving a problem the first time it happens is usually a pretty ugly business. You’ll feel better afterwards, but you really shouldn’t.
You should feel better when systems are put in place to make things go smoother the next time around — so you only have to deal with the pain in the ass once. That is real problem solving, I think. And I need to get better at doing things this way on a consistent basis.
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One of the side benefits of doing things this way, and having a systematic resolution for issues, is that some day, you can outsource those sorts of things. If you can turn something over to someone else with a “manual” of how to deal with issues as they come up, then you can offload some of the responsibility. Derek Sivers wrote a bit about this in his latest, Anything You Want.
Absolutely, and that’s the main goal of what my friend and I are working on right now. Tough getting all those systems in place, but the beauty of it is that you really only need to do it once.
Great post. It is easy to get caught up with growing your idea and either forget about the back-end systems or feel you just don’t have the time. That always reminds me of the saying that “A mistake on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part”. Systems are critical. Not everyone does well with creating systems or using them so it is vital to get help if you need it.
Solving a problem is good, preventing a problem is priceless.