How to fix hacked WordPress site?

The development of CMS applications made it easy for everyone to build their custom business website and also made it easy to launch themselves into the world wide web.

Increasing the platforms will result in the rapid growth of websites. But what about security?

Yes, security also is a nightmare for everyone. For a beginner setting up a WordPress blog is very easy, but not in terms of security.

Security implies building several layers of blockage for hackers. Hackers are not concentrating on you alone, you will come across while he is scanning millions of websites at once or a whole hosting provider's server. Several tactics are used by hackers to enter into your websites. I am not covering those methods, I am here explaining how to recover a hacked site.

See what you will lose after your site is under control of a hacker

You will lose complete traffic

Revenue

Brand value

Customer data

The bloggers can easily recover their site, though they haven't much data in bulk. But what about e-commerce webmasters. They lose all credibility with wholesales.

Website owners are installing plugins for the sake of security. Are they serving the purpose?

How to find your site is really hacked?

1.Install Malcare’s free malware and scan your site, within a couple of minutes.

2. Use Sucuri website scanner (https://sitecheck.sucuri.net)

Common symptoms of hacked sites

1.Google Chrome will show the warning message. Chrome will inform your site contains malware

2.Google search console will give you notification of hacking or malware

3.Hosting providers completely stop your site when you use excess server resources.

4.Customers complain about abnormal activities like excess credit card amounts debited or redirecting from your site to any other sites.

5.Your domain is on the blacklist and emails are sent to the spam folder

6.Malware slower your site

7.Ads or Pop-Ups open automatically

8.The whole website is being redirected to malicious links

9.Unwanted traffic to your websites

10.While you are reading this article better backup your WordPress website.

How to clean your WordPress hacked website automatically and manually or by availing professional services.

You are supposed to back up your WordPress website at certain intervals or you have to keep in touch to purchase a plan for backup and restore, which can restore your site within a couple of minutes.

How to clean your WordPress website after your site is infected?

You could either start with your own to identify the files inside the CMS and Plugins folder.

1.Restore immediately.

Either use your files to replace the whole site or use the hosting providers' restore method. This method is highly recommended because verifying each core file and plugin scan will take time. Remember time is your money.

After the restoration, you can approach any security professional to check the vulnerability or backdoor.

After that, you can purchase premium plugins. So in the future, this won't happen.

2.Finding the malicious codes inside WordPress files systems ( maybe tedious task)

A hacker will always inject codes inside CMS files and create links all over the websites. Some hackers do some may not, but it's worth a try.

Major Folders which will affect the codes

The folders start with wp-, within this wp-content and wp-includes are the major folders to start checking.

3.Malicious link insertions

Most WordPress hacked websites contain string patterns. You can search your WordPress core files to find these string patterns.

wp-config.php;

.htaccess

wp-activate.php

wp-blog-header.php

wp-comments-post.php

wp-config-sample.php

wp-cron.php

wp-links-opml.php

wp-load.php

wp-login.php

wp-mail.php

wp-settings.php

wp-signup.php

wp-trackback.php

xmlrpc.php

For this, you need to understand PHP deeply, so before attempting to delete any strings will break your site completely.

Verify these strings are there or not

tmpcontentx

function wp_temp_setupx

wp-tmp.php

derna.top/code.php

stripos($tmpcontent, $wp_auth_key)

4.Inspecting the Functions.php file

Any hacker mainly targets hosts function.php files, so there may be malicious links present in this file.

Depending on the types of attacks you could see different types of entries on this file.

Hackers could insert a redirect link here and you could try to update the theme to solve the PHP errors.

5.Check the user permissions and users

A hacker tries different ways to gain access to the site permanently, so once he hacked then opens all the possibility to enter into the site in the future. So checking the permissions and any additional admin users are created or not.

If found change the folder permissions and delete the excess admin users.

6.Change the Secret keys

You can generate a new set of keys and add it in the wp-config.php file, to force the login users to logout.

7.Change the passwords

Generate very complex passwords immediately after getting access with a dashboard. You can also enable 2FA for your site and will act as an additional layer of security.

Change WordPress, cPanel, FTP, MYSQL passwords.

8.Check your WordPress core files with diff-checker.

You can download your WordPress files and download the original WordPress folder from GitHub. So you can check each core file that is modified or not.

9.Get expert support from security professionals.

Security professionals are all over the world. But you can ask support from the security plugin company to clean your infections and they will provide all security checks in a paid manner.

Wordfence, Malware, Sucuri offers a wide range of free services including diff-checker. So installing these plugins is worth a try.

If you are prone to hack then you can stop using the free plugin, upgrade immediately so that you can concentrate on your business.

Conclusion

Before late make your own WordPress security check list and prepare backup for your site. You should have completely remove the contents and restore the files an Databases.