{"id":1776,"date":"2016-02-01T12:12:20","date_gmt":"2016-02-01T12:12:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.milesweb.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1776"},"modified":"2026-01-29T06:47:15","modified_gmt":"2026-01-29T06:47:15","slug":"my-wordpress-has-been-hacked-how-to-get-it-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.milesweb.co.uk\/blog\/wordpress\/my-wordpress-has-been-hacked-how-to-get-it-back\/","title":{"rendered":"WordPress Hacked! No More a Headache"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Nothing is more frustrating than finding out that your WordPress website is hacked. After all, your WordPress website is your hard work over many months or years and the last thing that you expect isn\u2019t learning that your website is hacked. In order to prevent hackers from attacking your WordPress website, the first step is to know what are the possibilities and reasons for your WordPress website to get hacked. With a better understanding of these reasons, it will be easy for you to implement solutions for preventing the hacking attempts on your WordPress website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why Do Hackers Target WordPress?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Not just WordPress but all types of websites on the internet are vulnerable to hacking attempts. One of the main reasons why the WordPress websites are a common target for the hackers is because WordPress is the most popular website building platform. As WordPress is extremely popular and commonly used, hackers constantly try to find out websites that are less secure so they can breach into such websites. Hackers have different motives for hacking websites. Some of the hackers are beginners who are learning to analyze and get into the less secure websites; while some hackers have malicious intentions like injecting a website with Malware, making use of a website to attack other websites or performing spamming activities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How A WordPress Site Gets Hacked?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It is important to understand how a WordPress site gets hacked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Below are the types of WordPress security vulnerabilities that lead to hacking of your website:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Backdoors
\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

With the backdoor vulnerability, hackers get secret passages that bypass security encryption for getting access to WordPress websites via irregular methods \u2013 wp-Admin, FTP, SFTP, etc. Once they get an access, hackers can cause disaster on hosting servers with the help of backdoors by cross-site contamination attacks \u2013 affecting multiple sites hosted on the same server. As per the Sucuri\u2019s Q3 2017 report backdoors continue to be one of the many post-hack actions taken by the attackers, with 71% of the infected sites that have some form of backdoor injection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Often, backdoors are encrypted in such a way that they appear like legitimate WordPress system files, and get an access to WordPress databases by taking the advantage of weaknesses and bugs in outdated versions of the platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A prime example of backdoor vulnerability, TimThumb fiasco exploited the old scripts and outdated software impacting millions of websites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can prevent the backdoor vulnerability by scanning your WordPress site with tools such as SiteCheck which easily detects the common backdoors. Additionally, you can also block IPs, enable two-factor authentication, restrict admin access and prevent unauthorized execution of PHP files easily to secure from this vulnerability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pharma Hacks
\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

With Pharma Hack the hacker can insert rogue code in outdated versions of WordPress websites and plugins, due to which the search engines return ads for pharmaceutical products when an affected website is searched for. The vulnerability appears to be a spam instead of traditional malware. But the search engines get enough reason to block the site for distributing spam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pharma Hack includes backdoors in plugins and databases. However, the exploits are often in the form of encrypted malicious injections present in databases and require a detailed clean-up process to fix the vulnerability. Pharma<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hacks can be easily prevented by asking your WordPress hosting providers for updating the servers and regularly updating your WordPress installations, themes, and plugins. MilesWeb offers the automatic WordPress updates feature that keeps your WordPress always updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>Brute-force Login Attempts<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In Brute-force login attempts, automated scripts are used for abusing weak passwords and gaining access to your site. Limiting login attempts, two-step authentication, blocking IPs, monitoring unauthorized logins and using strong passwords are some of the easiest and highly effective ways to avoid brute-force attacks. Though these security practices are easy to implement many WordPress website owners fail to perform these security practices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Due to this, hackers are easily able to destroy as much as 30,000 websites in a single day via brute-force attacks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Malicious Redirects
\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Using malicious redirects, backdoors are created in WordPress installations using SFTP, FTP, wp-admin, and other protocols, and redirection codes are injected into the website. Usually, the redirects are placed in your .htaccess file and other WordPress core files in encoded forms that direct the web traffic to malicious sites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

 <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

 <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) involves injecting a malicious script into a trusted website or application. This is used by the attacker to send malicious code, typically browser-side scripts, to the end user without letting them know about it. Usually, the intent is to grab cookie or session data or perhaps even rewrite HTML on a page.
WordFence states that Cross-Site Scripting vulnerabilities, commonly found vulnerability in WordPress plugins by a significant margin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

 <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Denial of Service
\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

And now this is the most dangerous of all, Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability. This exploits errors and bugs in the code to overcome the memory of website operating systems. Hackers have threatened millions of websites and earned millions of dollars by abusing outdated and buggy versions of WordPress software with DoS attacks. Though small companies won\u2019t be a target of financially motivated cybercriminals, they try to commit outdated vulnerable websites to create botnet chains for attacking large businesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, even the latest WordPess software versions can\u2019t broadly fight against the high-profile DoS attacks, but will surely help you to avoid getting trapped in the fight between financial institutions and refined cybercriminals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How to identify if your website has actually been hacked?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The worst thing happened, when you entered to your blog and tried to open it but you have a warning message saying that your site has been hacked. OMG. \u2026\u2026 What to do now?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, now you wonder how to recover the hacked WordPress site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the first thing that you should do is don\u2019t panic, take deep breath and get relaxed and try to identify the problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First thing you have to do is to figure out whether your site has actually been hacked or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, obviously it is the first thing you need to know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are plugins to detect whether your website was infected or not. For me one of the best tools to identify the WordPress infections is \u201cSucuri\u201d. In addition, by using Sucuri WordPress plugin you will get alert messages every time when someone will try to attack on your website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can identify if your site is really hacked if you face the below situations:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n