Defacement is one of the famous attack techniques to take down the website and hurt the business.
Thousands of sites getting defaced every day and HACKNAGEDDON reports 10.7% of them are due to defacement.
What is website defacement?
As the word “deface” means, hacker changes the content, visual appearance of the whole site, homepage or particular web page.
It depends on hacker intention but mostly seen as homepage replaced with their text, logo, and image.
Technically, this is possible when you break the web server or take the DNS registrar in control.
Here are some of the popular website defaced in the past.
Google Palestine website in 2013
Lenovo website in 2015
Delhi Airport website in 2013
Microsoft Office Blog in 2014
Having monitoring system in place notify you as, and when it happens so, it has minimal, or none reputational damage and business loss in case your website is defaced.
I hope now you have an idea about website defacement and let’s go through online tools to monitor your website and alert for any damage.
SUCURI
SUCURI offer all-in-one website security monitoring, protection, backup along with performance benefits.
Know when your site is having issues immediately. Not just when it is defaced with many other things like below.
- When DNS record gets changed
- Cross-site scripting infection
- When site get blacklisted by Google and other search engines
- Site is down
- Site is hijacked/hacked
- Conditional redirects
- Hidden malicious code
- Obfuscated JavaScript infections
- SSL certificate changes
- SEO spam
- and many more…
It works with any time of sites including WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Bulletin, phpBB, etc.
Status Cake
StatusCake let you configure the string to match on the page and if that doesn’t match it will alert you.
Along with string match warning, you can also configure following under single monitoring.
- How frequently (30/60 seconds, 15/30/60 minutes and daily) to your webpage should be checked
- How soon (0-60 minutes) alert to be triggered after the first downtime detected
- Blacklist Monitoring
- Select what all HTTP Status Code to be alerted
- Crawl Timeout
- Configure maintenance window so don’t get alert during known downtime
IPVTec
IPVTec is a monitoring service online tool which helps you to inform if your website is defaced.
You can configure to get notified by email, SMS or both. IPVTec also helps you to alert in the following scenario.
- SSL Certificate expires
- Website not available
- Hijacked
- Blacklist
- Malware detection
Site 24×7
Site 24×7 provide end-to-end monitoring services, and defacement detection is part of “Web Page Content Monitoring.”
There is a huge number of combination you can configure to get alerted when your website is defaced. Some of them are listed below.
- Check keyword present in the HTTP response
- Do case-sensitive keyword search
- Monitor from multiple locations
- Notify when certain percentage of content is changed
- Notify when image size change, image count exceed
- Notify when script size, CSS count exceed
Visualping
It allows you to select the website area you want to monitor and get notified of any changes detected.
It’s more like a visual comparison to trigger alerts on tiny, medium or significant changes at an interval of daily, hourly or weekly.
So if you are looking to monitor a specific area of your page, visualping is worth giving a try.
OnWebChange
OnWebChange helps you to select multiple areas within your webpage and notify for any changes detected. Along with web page, you can also monitor files like PDF, images, videos, plain text, etc.
You have an option to configure the way you want to be notified by email, pushover, teamstinct or HTTP callback.
WebOrion
WebOrion monitor offers visual change, content & integrity monitoring. You have an option to receive notification by email, SMS or Webhooks.
WebOrion monitor service is available on Cloud (SaaS), on-premise appliance or virtual appliance.
Versionista
Versionista crawls the entire site to monitor changes and notifies by e-mail or slack. Not just HTML but Versionista is capable of track changes in PDF, text and dynamic contents as well.
It performs a visual ping on entire site.
Monitis
One of the popular cloud-based site monitoring platforms offers blacklist and defacement monitoring.
Monitis checks every 12 hours and notifies on any possibilities of a site being defaced or blacklisted.
Wachete
Monitor particular area or entire site every 24 hours for FREE. And, if you need to increase the frequency then upgrade to check every hour from $4.90 per month.
Wachete is capable of monitoring password protected page, dynamic page and integrates well with third-party products.
Wachete got their mobile apps for Android, Windows, and iOS to track the changes and receive push notifications.
I hope above tools help you to get notified in case of your website is defaced so you can take action quickly and save organization reputation.
To monitorin web pages you can use NeoWatcher. It’s usefull for your sites and you can watch your competitors.
Thanks for the article, for me it’s very useful!
Great, thanks for visiting Jeremy.