Suspicious activity on my infoproduct site?

5 replies
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Can anyone tell me how I can tell if my website has been hacked? And is it possible for a hacker to somehow redirect my sales? My sales have dropped to next to none for the last 2 and a half weeks and at the same time, my foreign site traffic has skyrocketed. Is that suspicious? Normally, I have several sales per day for the last 2 years. Now all of a sudden, I get maybe 1 small sale every couple of days. Something seems wrong.

I have checked my Google rankings to see if my ranking had dropped and that would explain a sudden drop in sales but my ranking is still excellent. Out of the blue, my site is now getting almost 20% traffic from Google Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Ireland, Belgium, Philippines, India and Singapore. My U.S sales have dropped to almost nothing and the few sales that have come in are from these other countries. My target market & SEO efforts are only for the United States. Also, an ad that I run that typically brings in a ton of sales per day is now running and people are clicking on it but no sales. I find that suspicious too.

I checked my Google Webmaster account for my site and there are no security alerts/flags. I also signed up for Godaddy's Website Protection and ran the scan and that came back fine however after that, it keeps saying an error occurred when I try to launch the scan to rescan it again.

Any advice/thoughts? Am I being paranoid? How can I check it to be sure?
#activity #infoproduct #site #suspicious
  • Profile picture of the author Ron Killian
    Does seem odd, though not unheard of.

    Course your checking all the wrong things, you need to check your sales system, see if that has some how been changed. It's happened to me before.

    Better yet, make a test purchase, or have a friend/family member try to purchase. You could refund them right after. See who get's paid.

    Hard to say, as you have not mentioned your sales system.

    Also, are you checking your site files on a daily basis? You could use a FTP program and monitor if any files have been changed or added.
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  • Profile picture of the author jquadranet
    If you're still receiving any sales at all, it seems unlikely that it would be the result of a hack (it'd have to be an insanely clever hack to only redirect most of your sales elsewhere). It could be, as Ron mentioned, something wrong with your sales system (something might've changed that impacts clients' desire to do business with you? SSL certificate perhaps?), or it could also be something like your htaccess is preventing people from certain parts of the world from accessing your site (perhaps your host changed this inadvertently?). There are a lot of possibilities...it might be worthwhile to pay a consultant to check it out and make sure everything is functioning normally.
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    • Profile picture of the author phpg
      Originally Posted by jquadranet View Post

      If you're still receiving any sales at all, it seems unlikely that it would be the result of a hack (it'd have to be an insanely clever hack to only redirect most of your sales elsewhere)
      It's actually pretty easy and obvious thing to do for the hacker, to draw less suspicion.


      it might be worthwhile to pay a consultant to check it out and make sure everything is functioning normally.
      Now this is really good advice!

      However, if your sales are stolen, why don't you get any complaints from customers for not getting their products? Or is it some kind of download, which is also not tracked, so you can't see that it was downloaded more times than purchased?
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  • Profile picture of the author SJL
    Troubleshooting 101

    Step 1
    Try to buying something yourself few times.
    (assuming you can cancel orders, from the backend)

    Step 2
    If you can reproduce the problem. Ask your hosting provider if they updated anything.
    (for example PHP updates can cause problems)
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  • Profile picture of the author RobinInTexas
    Are you running WordPress? there are a couple of good plugins, including wordfence that will scan your site and compare the files to the distribution as well as look for malicious code.
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    Robin



    ...Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just set there.
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