No more content

  • I am helping a friend of mine operate a multisite-wordpress install. The main address is https://blogs4me.de, and there are about a dozen sites in it. Since about a week ago (as far as we noticed), all of our blogs stopped working. That is, their frontpages still show headers and menus (the contents of header.php, as I was able to verify looking at the HTML source), but nothing more. The admin pages of all blogs were also unavailable. Trying to visit them in the browser just timed out. Also, the FTP server was unavailable. My friend has a root server running a Windows and WAMP setup.

    My friend rebootet the server, and also uploaded the last known good WordPress version, 3.2 that is, because we thought it might have been a faulty bugfix upgrade. Now, at least, we can access the FTP server again, as well as the admin pages of all blogs of the network.

    “Of course” (sigh!) he doesn’t have a decent backup, and therefore we have to go forward and try to fix the situation from here.

    It looks like the index.php or page.php scripts start executing. At least they execute the header.php, which is always first. The output from header.php is also sent to the browser. But then, all processing stops and no more output gets sent to the browser.

    We also deactivated all plugins, and the no-content-behavior wasn’t resolved.

    Does anybody have a clue about what might trigger such behavior?
    Is the PHP interpreter faulty?
    Can a virus or script infection cause something like this? (I don’t think so, because a) a virus scan of the whole Windows box didn’t show anything unusual, and b) uploading WP 3.2 files should have fixed any maybe manipulated files)
    Did we miss an important update?
    Did we do one update too many?

    Any help that might point us in the right direction is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
    — TheRider

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    Try re-saving the permalinks on the sites. But also check if you can see the CONTENT of the posts in the admin side. That is, can you add new posts and see the old ones on the back end?

    Thread Starter TheRider62

    (@therider62)

    Yes, the backend looks perfectly normal. All the pages are there, as well as all the posts.

    Thread Starter TheRider62

    (@therider62)

    I will try re-saving the permalinks, but wouldn’t that influence everything EXCEPT the main page? But not even that main page works, see, for example, https://hei-art.de

    Thread Starter TheRider62

    (@therider62)

    re-saving the permalinks doesn’t help. ??

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    Check your error logs on the server, and also try a different theme. It looks like the HTML is being truncated, so it’s possible you’re running out of memory or have a PHP error.

    Thread Starter TheRider62

    (@therider62)

    I found the culprit. The server got hacked. Every header.php, footer.php and index.php from every installed theme has been modified. A 10KB string was added at the end. The string looks something like this:

    <?php @error_reporting(0); if (!isset($eva1fYlbakBcVSir)) {$eva1fYlbakBcVSir = “7kyJ7kSKioDTWVWe…..

    I just deleted it from all those files (they all had the same change date), and now our sites work again like a charm.

    Ugh! I’m feeling lucky!

    Now I need to make sure that the same thing can’t happen again. I just noticed that the Xampp-User has Write-Access to all files on the server. This will change NOW!

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    Also change all your passwords. ESPECIALLY the ones in wp-config.php and other readable passwordy places.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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