• Resolved gillesweno

    (@gillesweno)


    hi,
    We regurlaly receive email notices from Sucuri telling us that the page was updated by Googlebot and other bots, incuding some that look like spambots.

    How come a bot can update a page? When using page revisions from the admin backend, there’s no history of the changes and the pages seem intact on the frontend.

    Thanks,

    message:
    Website: http://www.xxxxxx.ca
    IP Address: 66.249.69.46
    Reverse IP: crawl-66-249-69-46.googlebot.com
    Date/Time: 2018-03-07 22:37
    Message:
    Page was updated; ID: 337; name: Questions fréquemment posées (FAQ)

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  • How come a bot can update a page?

    A web crawler cannot do that by itself.

    What I think is happening is that your website is designed in such a way that when a HTTP request hits the FAQ page the code is reacting by applying a modification. It is not possible to know what was the modification using the information above, but I could think of some:

    • Maybe the post table has a visitor counter column that is counting the number of visits, which means that every time a HTTP request is detected, the content of the table is modified and this triggers the security alert.
    • Maybe there is another plugin running in the background that is modifying an existing column in the database, I have seen some 3rd-party themes updating the “created_at” and “updated_at” columns.
    • Maybe there is a bug in your code that is mistakingly triggering the execution of the publish_page WordPress hook which is what the Sucuri plugin uses to detect changes in the posts and pages.
    • etc […]

    Your web developer may have more information.

    At this point, it’s not possible for me to give you a better answer because I don’t know how your website was built. I will be marking this ticket as resolved, but if you have the PHP source code of the FAQ page and are willing to share it we can re-open the ticket and continue the investigation.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

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