Not sure if this is the place to ask, but maybe somebody can point me in the right direction.
My former webmaster installed a piece of malicious code in the header of my business website to stop Search Engine crawlers from finding my website. It has cost me over $100k in lost revenue.
I have talked to several people and they tell me it is not possible to prove this with his login/password info that I believe has got to be kept in some sort of digital log. Surely, there are digital tracks left behind that can prove in black/white that he did this?
Anybody?
twisted arrow D
Greetings,
The answer is a definitive "maybe". It depends on many factors, including but not limited to, the web server, the hosting server, authentication mechanisms, timeframe, when the event occurred, what else has changed since the event, how the change was made, and what is logged.
-David
Could we go back a level ? "malicious code" ? The simplest way of doing this would be to set robots.txt to exclude crawlers - this is a standard thing so there is no "malware" involved.
It's not unusual practice, especially during the development of a site so that it isn't indexed in a way which is incomplete, it is also common to use it to try to exclude robots from certain areas that you don't want indexed … Are you sure that the motive was malicious, or perhaps it could have been (a) forgetting to take it out (b) takining it out incorrectly or © a misconfiguration that excluded more than was intentional ?
David is right, there is a distinct "maybe" possiblity - that you could show that he uploaded the file - on the other hand - if you know the account details as well it could just show that a legitimate user did so - maybe you'll have an IP address, but that's not guaranteed …
I think that you'll find this a hard one to get restitution for - not least because you'll have to justify your claimed $100k losses - if it's a new website - proving this would be hard - if it's an old website - existing indexes of the site would still exist, so the figure would still be hard to justify … And that's before you have to show that it was him, and then prove that it was done deliberately.
More information would be interesting -)