It's every webmaster's worst nightmare, coming in one morning and seeing that your website has been hacked and spending the rest of the day trying to get the website back to where it was, and fix and server side issues with security.  Once this has been done, you then have to battle against any impact on your SEO campaign as well

We've posted a tool to help you tell if your website has been hacked, but now Google Webmaster tools are offering alerts for website owners in it's Message center.

If a CMS or publishing service has a possible security issues then a message will appear in the message center informing you about the potential risk and if there is a solution, recommending where you can resolve this issue.

At the moment this new service is in beta version and is being trialled on WordPress blogs first of all, as this is a common tool on the web. At the moment people using WordPress 2.1.1 will shortly get a message in their Google Webmaster Tools Message Center letting them know about an upgrade to the WordPress Software.

Hopefully, once this initial trial is complete, the service will be rolled out to more server types and benefit all webmasters!