How to Fight against Website Hijacking Attacks

As someone who once ran a blog myself, I have to say that it's not easy staying on top of every little minutiae that goes into the upkeep, progression and even protection of your online web space. Yes, believe it or not, it's possible for your site to be hijacked or targeted by distributed denial attacks (DDoS), but a less harmful and frequently overlooked issue is bot spam. I'm not talking about the obnoxiously obvious comment section spam in particular; this is more about the issues that silently fly under the radar behind the front page that you and your visitors see.

Take this scenario for example: You've got this nice little web page running, everything's fine, you're uploading posts and other content, and then bam � surge of traffic. You might be used to seeing a few hundred hits per day, but the stats log indicates that you've seen a five-fold jump overnight for no apparent reason. The hits are from a source that looks shady or seems to come from nowhere at all, and the really weird part is, the "traffic" isn't sticking around for more than a few seconds at most. What is this phenomena? Did someone connect your page with a well-placed back-link?

Actually, this is more often than not a result of your page being targeted by a software service that's trying to exploit your creation for someone else's benefit. It can be done to gain access to the administrative rights, to artificially inflate your exposure to levels that concern the hosting service or search engines, or it can be done to implant malware on the page. There are times when someone else's link or embedded scripts in your page can be exploited to target either you or someone else along the chain of back-links that are supposed to naturally increase your views.

In cases like these, it's hard to be sure who and what is doing it, but you're recommended to block the offending IP address(es). Depending on where you're hosted, your control panel may provide you with the statistic; otherwise, you may need to depend on third-party services to help you work out the cause and put an end to it. Stay safe out there.