Has my WordPress site been hacked?

  • Hi All

    I noticed a drop in traffic to my website a day or two ago so did a little digging. Whereas I used to appear on the first page of Google for my chosen SEO keyword phrases, my homepage now doesn’t appear at all!

    This was a little alarming. I did a ‘site:domain.com’ Google search of my website and there are dozens and dozens of spurious listings for pages that don’t exist!

    They are all formatted something like this and all link to my homepage:

    domain.com/?page_name=Buy+Flonase+Without+Prescription&id=56
    domain.com/?page_name=Purchase+Rimonabant+From+Canada&id=102
    etc.

    I’ve checked my pages and posts and nothing seems amiss. I’m using WordPress SEO (Yoast) and Limit Login Attempts but no other plugins. There is nothing showing up as an error or warning in Google Webmaster Tools.

    I’m totally at a loss as to how to rectify this situation. Has my website been hacked/compromised? Or the hosting? Or the database?

    I’m desperate to recover my website, it’s previous good natural listings and delete these erroneous entries but don’t know where to begin! Just hoping someone in the WP community can point me in the right direction.

    Thanks

    Q

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Follow all the steps here https://codex.www.ads-software.com/FAQ_My_site_was_hacked

    Also contact your webhost and explain the situation and ask for their help in examining the site.

    Hi,
    Well, I was say that if you are seeing pharmacy words and you didn’t add them then most certainly your site is compromised.

    Is very unlikely your database was hacked and more likely some file within your website was “edited” and/or added.

    Recommend you start by changing your WordPress admin’s and FTP passwords. That never hurts.

    As for the listings in Google, those will only disappear over time once you remove the hacker code in your website files.

    Log into your Webmasters tools as well and use the Crawl -> “Fetch as Google” option to fetch your website. Then click the fetched “Comlete” link to see if that pharm text is still appearing.

    So, back to the first point. Do you have a web designer who can assist you in reviewing what files might have been changed on your website recently?

    Hi Q

    You’re dealing with something known as Search Engine Poisoning (SEP). You’ve lost your ranking because of the SEP attack. What we have found is once you repair your environment you can often regain your website reputation with Google by submitting it for reconsideration.

    Are you able to share your domain with us?

    Thread Starter —Q—

    (@-q--1)

    Hi All and thanks for the replies. I did pretty much everything that was suggested in the link from the first poster (Mark podz). My ISP detected the ‘FileMan’ exploit was being used – a file titled ‘index.php’ had been placed in the images folder of my theme. I removed this, checked the other files and the database and no damage or changes seem to have been made.

    I’ve changed my WP and FTP passwords as suggested. I’ve also done the Fetch as Google thing from my Webmaster tools and the pharmacy words are not appearing. But that’s the strange thing – they never have. I’ve checked my posts and pages, my images and my DB and the pharmacy words appear nowhere other than Google.

    I’d recommend you kill php execution in that directory to make sure backdoors like that Filesman are never used again. I talk about that here: https://blog.sucuri.net/2012/08/wordpress-security-cutting-through-the-bs.html

    <Files *.php>
Order Allow, Deny
Deny from all
</Files>

    You want to make sure you use this in uploads as well.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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