Re-Upload an Infected and Crashed WP Blog

  • Dear Forum,

    My blog at visaulcultureblog.com was infected by malware about 6 weeks ago. I was running version 4.3.1 and I was able to find the infected pages, find the malware code on these pages and re-upload a clean version of these pages using FTP. This worked seemingly quite well. To avoid future complications I deleted all plugins (except for Akismet which I reinstalled as a new version) and installed WordFence which scans the site for malware.

    A week ago Wordfence alerted me to yet more malware and I proceeded to delete files which have been infected. In total I deleted probably two or three files and in retrospect I should have proceeded with more care because I did not make a note which files I deleted but WordFence indicated that these files are not crucial to the infrastructure of the blog. While doing this I also downloaded the newest version of WP 4.4. Once I was done activating 4.4 things went pretty bad. I had no more access to visaulcultureblog.com and I could no longer access the /wp-admin page. I was shut out from the blog from all angles.

    Luckily I downloaded a clean version of the blog(I think) just after I fixed all issues six weeks ago. I then did something which I am not sure any more was a smart thing to do: I uploaded the clean version onto the server using FTP, and overwriting old files. This had no effect whatsoever and I am still locked out of the blog.

    From reading these forums I am aware that the wp-content folder (which I have on my hard drive) is very important. Though the thing that makes me quite nervous is that I cannot find my blog posts in this folder. I can find photos and other material related to the blog posts, but not the written post itself.

    Can anyone on here help me with this issue? I am starting to get quite nervous and I don’t really know how to proceed.

    Any help would be very much appreciated.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Thread Starter visualcultureblog

    (@visualcultureblog)

    I just found out that my host (host monster) has an option whereby I can “restore” my blog back to how it was August 2015. Since I didn’t write massive amounts since then, I am wondering if this is now the best option available to me? Could I upload old posts by backdating them somehow?

    Your posts/pages (as well as plugin/theme settings, users, etc) are stored in the site’s database, not in the site files.

    If you’re able to restore your site to a previous date then I would definitely recommend doing that. If your database is not infected (no spam in your posts, for example) then you could probably just export your current database, have your host restore the site back, and then re-upload your current database, thereby saving your most recent posts.

    There is usually a database management tool available from within your hosting account (usually PHPMyAdmin) or you can use this:

    https://adminer.org/

    Hi, like rngdm said,

    I would add that that unless your previous host is totally stupid, and you still pay them, your post storage is still safe in database (you can’t infect a database because there is no possible way to execute a virus from pure db).

    After, unlike rngdm said, images with WordPress are not stored in Database for good reasons I won’t detail. But, yes, it’s possible to recover them by ftp or so (please use a good antivirus software/malware or so).

    The question you might also ask is, a good decent hoster has very strong hardware firewalls so.. who was this host?

    Regards,

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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