Title: disk usage growing (Hacked?)
Last modified: August 22, 2016

---

# disk usage growing (Hacked?)

 *  [martin](https://wordpress.org/support/users/marstin/)
 * (@marstin)
 * [11 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/disk-usage-growing-hacked/)
 * I am not doing anything to my wordpress site but the disk space usage shown in
   the cPanel is growing simultaneously, growing hour by hour. (my site is 2xxmb
   in size for a long time, because each blog is about 3 mb to 5 mb, But the site
   was 3xxmb last night and is >440mb at this moment)
 * The stuff which is growing are:
    1. MySQL database (from about 15mb to 60mb) 
   2. this directory: “.cagefs”
 * What should I do, I think I maybe hacked.

Viewing 14 replies - 1 through 14 (of 14 total)

 *  Moderator [t-p](https://wordpress.org/support/users/t-p/)
 * (@t-p)
 * [11 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/disk-usage-growing-hacked/#post-5293983)
 * First, try scanning your site at this Malware and Security Scanner: [http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/](http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/)
 *  Thread Starter [martin](https://wordpress.org/support/users/marstin/)
 * (@marstin)
 * [11 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/disk-usage-growing-hacked/#post-5293991)
 * Scanned by this remote scanner, nothing found, just an advertising scanner.
 * actually I used Duplicator “Create Package”, it will scan the wordpress site 
   briefly, the size is 280 mb and the MySQL is about 11 mb. (i.e. the increased
   usage for MySQL database is not the wordpress database but another datebase)
 * So I think the problem is outside the public.html directory.
 *  Moderator [t-p](https://wordpress.org/support/users/t-p/)
 * (@t-p)
 * [11 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/disk-usage-growing-hacked/#post-5293993)
 * does not look your site has been comromised.
 * From a security standpoint, review this codexto harden your site: [http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress](http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress)
 *  Thread Starter [martin](https://wordpress.org/support/users/marstin/)
 * (@marstin)
 * [11 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/disk-usage-growing-hacked/#post-5294015)
 * Tara, do you think your suggestion useful ?
 *  [RossMitchell](https://wordpress.org/support/users/rossmitchell/)
 * (@rossmitchell)
 * [11 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/disk-usage-growing-hacked/#post-5294040)
 * Also google you site name, is it turning up in unexpected places ?
 * Look at your website logs, anything being accessed you don’t know about ?
 * What is happening to your site’s bandwidth usage ?
 *  [perezbox](https://wordpress.org/support/users/perezbox/)
 * (@perezbox)
 * [11 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/disk-usage-growing-hacked/#post-5294168)
 * SiteCheck won’t help in this case.
 * I’d check your database to see if you’re being loaded with SPAM. Often comes 
   via comments that go unchecked – allows anyone ot add, etc….
 * Tony
 *  [Lacey](https://wordpress.org/support/users/lacemastarson/)
 * (@lacemastarson)
 * [11 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/disk-usage-growing-hacked/#post-5294176)
 * I am having the same problem. Starting 9/12/14 disk space usage jumped from practically
   nothing to up over 12gb. I used SiteCheck, didn’t find anything. I’m looking 
   into the databases now. I’m not very familiar with looking through databases,
   but I will let you know if I find something. Please also let me know if you find
   a solution.
 * Lacey
 *  [InclusiveHost-John](https://wordpress.org/support/users/inclusivehost-john/)
 * (@inclusivehost-john)
 * [11 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/disk-usage-growing-hacked/#post-5294184)
 * “cageFS” is related to your web hosting provider running CloudLinux. I suggest
   you contact them to determine the usage of the space, they have more tools available
   at their disposal than you do as an end user.
 *  [Lacey](https://wordpress.org/support/users/lacemastarson/)
 * (@lacemastarson)
 * [11 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/disk-usage-growing-hacked/#post-5294194)
 * I ended up deleting several of the backups created by Updraft Plus, hopefully
   that fixes the problem. I kind of doubt that is the problem though because those
   backups were each created a week a part. It doesn’t really make sense that it
   would cause my disk space usage to jump 12GB all at once, unless the tool my 
   hosting account uses to show disk space usage started working or stopped working
   on 9/12.
 *  [BenSucuri](https://wordpress.org/support/users/rngdmstr/)
 * (@rngdmstr)
 * [11 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/disk-usage-growing-hacked/#post-5294200)
 * Search your database for these terms:
 * viagra
    levitra payday casino rolex left:- left: – top:- top: –
 * See if you can find any injected spam.
 *  [Lacey](https://wordpress.org/support/users/lacemastarson/)
 * (@lacemastarson)
 * [11 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/disk-usage-growing-hacked/#post-5294213)
 * I searched the databases like rngdmstr recommended (thank you!). It says there
   is one match inside table PROCESSLIST.
 * What should I do now?
 * Any help is very much appreciated!
 *  [perezbox](https://wordpress.org/support/users/perezbox/)
 * (@perezbox)
 * [11 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/disk-usage-growing-hacked/#post-5294214)
 * Have you already contacted your host regrading their thoughts on what is taking
   up the space?
 * Tony
 *  [Lacey](https://wordpress.org/support/users/lacemastarson/)
 * (@lacemastarson)
 * [11 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/disk-usage-growing-hacked/#post-5294216)
 * Tony,
 * Thanks for responding. Yeah I called support, they looked through things and 
   didn’t see an obvious answer. They suggested I go through every folder and look
   for very large files. I looked through all the folders that had been recently
   updated and the only kind of large files were the backups. I deleted most of 
   those, but there is not much of a change in the disk space usage, still over 
   12GB.
 * One of the support people I talked with told me that it would not be caused by
   something in ny MySQL databases because they are stored on a different server(
   something like that), but since I did find that one result with spam words there(
   from rngdmstr’s suggestion) I wonder if he was wrong.
 * I’ll try calling tech support again tomorrow.
 *  [flashrebel](https://wordpress.org/support/users/flashrebel/)
 * (@flashrebel)
 * [11 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/disk-usage-growing-hacked/#post-5294217)
 * Also check if any of your plugin does not save some kind of datas to database,
   for example also if cache plugin purge garbage right, revision … many plugins
   can save tons of datas.

Viewing 14 replies - 1 through 14 (of 14 total)

The topic ‘disk usage growing (Hacked?)’ is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [hacked](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/hacked/)
 * [MySQL](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/mysql/)

 * In: [Hacks](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/plugins-and-hacks/hacks/)
 * 14 replies
 * 8 participants
 * Last reply from: [flashrebel](https://wordpress.org/support/users/flashrebel/)
 * Last activity: [11 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/disk-usage-growing-hacked/#post-5294217)
 * Status: not resolved

## Topics

### Topics with no replies

### Non-support topics

### Resolved topics

### Unresolved topics

### All topics
