9 Website Defacement Monitoring Tools for Better Security

Defacement is one of the famous attack techniques to take down the website and hurt the business.

Thousands of sites are getting defaced every day. An interesting statistic shows more than 270,000 sites got defaced in 2019.

What is website defacement?

The word “deface” means that the hacker changes the content, visual appearance of the whole site, homepage, or particular web page. It depends on hacker intention but is mostly seen as homepage replaced with their text, logo, and image.

Technically, this is possible when you break the webserver or take the DNS registrar in control. Here are some of the popular websites defaced in the past.

Google Palestine website in 2013

Lenovo website in 2015

Delhi Airport website in 2013

Microsoft Office Blog in 2014

You see, having a monitoring system in place will notify you instantly when the site gets defaced, so reputational and business impact is none or minimal. Let’s take a look at the following solution.

Fluxguard

Receive an alert immediately when your web page pixel, DOM, and content change.

Fluxguard is cloud-based, capable of rendering all types of web pages, including a password-protected dashboard and form actions.

Along with defacement monitoring, Fluxguard can help you with QA automation, synthetic transaction, visual regression, and application performance monitoring.

You can eliminate the manual testing after every change by comparing the web page’s screenshots, code, and content. The following is an incomplete list of features.

• Automatically monitor newly found links.
• Multiple browser and resolution supported.
• Not just English, but it can monitor Chinese, Korean, Japanese, including Emoji

Fluxguard looks promising, and you can get it started in FREE to watch 75 pages. Give it a try to see how it works.

Visualping

Visualping is the world’s leading website change detectors and monitoring tool. The system crawls the web pages you select and sends you an alert as soon as a change occurs. So it is a great tool for quickly finding out about website defacement and other cyberattacks.

It is capable of detecting textual, visual, and HTML changes. The software offers various advanced features to monitor password-protected websites, alert you based on keywords on the web page, and monitor the pages on desktop or mobile.

To start monitoring websites using Visualping, you just need to follow these simple steps:

• Open Visualping in your browser
• Enter the URL of the website you want to monitor and press GO.
• Select the area of the web page to track.
• Enter the email address where you want to receive the notifications.
• Choose a frequency of checks: from 5 minutes to every hour, every day, or every week.
• Optionally, select the advanced settings to tailor it to your needs.
• Click on start free monitoring!

You can get started using Visualping for free or with one of the plans for individuals and businesses.

SUCURI

SUCURI offers all-in-one website security monitoring, protection, backup, along 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 a site gets blacklisted by Google and other search engines
• The site is hijacked/hacked/down
• Conditional redirects
• Hidden malicious code
• Obfuscated JavaScript infections
• SSL certificate changes
• SEO spam
• and many more…

It works with sites, including WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Bulletin, phpBB, etc.

IPVTec

IPVTec is a monitoring service online tool which helps you to inform you 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 provides end-to-end monitoring services, and defacement detection is part of “Website Monitoring.”

There is a considerable number of combinations 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 a case-sensitive keyword search
• Monitor from multiple locations
• Notify when a certain percentage of content is changed
• Notify when image size change, image count exceed
• Notify when script size, CSS count exceed

OnWebChange

OnWebChange helps you to select multiple areas within your webpage and notify for any changes detected. Along with a web page, you can also monitor files like PDFs, 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 notifications 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.

An alerting email contains a detailed monitoring report to give you complete information about what was changed. Every configured page is archived for detailed tracking. You can compare pages side-by-side.

Wachete

Monitor a particular area or entire site every 24 hours for FREE. And, if you need to increase the frequency, upgrade to check every hour from $4.90 per month.

Wachete is capable of monitoring password-protected pages, dynamic pages and integrates well with third-party products.

Wachete got its mobile apps for Android, Windows, and iOS to track the changes and receive push notifications.

Conclusion

I hope the above tools help you to monitor your website for defacement. Most of them offer a FREE trial, so I suggest trying a few and seeing what works best for you.

Stay Secured!