Introduction

Sometimes people want to move their website over to FASO because their previous website was compromised by hackers.

When you host your own website and use a CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, etc. your website runs the risk of being "hacked" if either the plugins or the CMS you're using is out of date. Hackers take advantage of known vulnerabilities and use them to inject spammy content in your website, host malware or for phishing purposes.

When this happens, search engines (like Google, Bing, etc.) and web browsers (like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc) will show very frightening warnings to your website visitors. This affects your website's reputation and prevents people from visiting it.

If you just created a FASO website or are planning on doing so, and you also want to use a personalized domain name that is affected by a situation like this, here are the steps you can follow.

Note: This may be a confusing and lengthy process, so patience is advised.

Steps

1) Run a diagnostic of your website, it will be important to know what's wrong in later steps. Enter your domain name in this diagnostic tool.

2) Add content and your beautiful artworks to your FASO website.

3) Point or transfer your domain name to us. If you're not sure what you should do, you can start here.

4) You may also want to enable SSL on your website.

5) Verify site ownership on "Google Search Console"

6) Once verified, check that the hacker didn't already verify ownership in Search Console and make unwanted settings changes.

• Navigate to the main Search Console homepage
• Find your site, then click Manage site.
• Click Add or remove users.
• Be sure that all users and owners listed are authorized.
• Document the email address of any unauthorized user (in case it's helpful in the future), then delete the user from your site.

6) Request a review.

• If the problem was Phishing
  • Complete the review at safebrowsing.google.com/safebrowsing/report_error/?hl=en. This review removes phishing warnings from phishing pages that have been cleaned.
• If the problem was Malware or Spam
  • Open the Security Issues report in Search Console. The report will probably still show the warnings and sample infected URLs you saw before.
  • If you still see any issues listed, select Request a review. In order to submit a review, Google will ask that you provide more information that the site is cleaned of the hacker's damage. For example, for each category within Security Issues, you can write a sentence explaining how the site was cleaned (for example, "Moved my site to a different website hosting application")

For more information you can visit Google's documentation here https://developers.google.com/webmasters/hacked/

Prior to 2015, malware could not affect a domain name, it would only affect the site itself. Once the domain was pointed to our servers, the malware warnings would have been removed as malware software discovered that it was ok once again.

Since times have changed, we recommend that you follow the entire procedure outlined above.

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