Forget about chasing "rankings", what you see is NOT what anyone else sees, and by faffing about with what YOU think is the cause, is more likely to harm than help.
We had an issue a few weeks back where, all our company emails were being rejected as spam,
Absolutely nothing at all to do with search traffic or search engines, but if the exploit was allowing the "crackers" to sent emails via your server could cause such a problem. Most email provider do not block using domain name as it is all too easy for spammers to "spoof" the domain name.
since bringing it in house, our web guy has told us that over the course of years and many hands, each programmer has left a back door open,
Unless your site uses some badly written server-side code or the hosting company is one of the bigger providers with a less than perfect record of security I would not be overly concerned, it's one of these 'scare tactics' that 'techies' like to throw in to conversations with humans, it is supposed to engender "trust" when really it means they have nothing useful to offer as to what the problem actually is so they try to cast blame elsewhere.
Unless you were really unlucky or "out sourced" the work without due diligence as to whom you were hiring as developers, it is more likely the exploit was in the hosting control panel.
Crackers and spammers very rarely 'break' bespoke software, simply because they do not have the code to test for a weakness, exploitable flaws or 'back doors', so they would rather go for the easier targets of code that is freely available for 'testing'.
Changing IPs probably also means changing servers which has "left behind" the exploit, so you should be looking at your server logs to see what URLs are being access by IPs from countries which are not really in your target market, South America and South East Asia are where the majority of attacks are from currently.
The other cause of the "rankings" drop is probably because your site URLs have all changed, this is where you should be redirecting old URLs to the equivalent new ones.
Chris.
Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Time flies like an arrow, however, fruit flies like a banana.
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