Site Hacked by

Aslam Nathoo
(@aslamn)

9 years, 8 months ago

Hello all,

I discovered this morning that my WordPress site was recently hacked. Someone got in and somehow changed the admin account password as well as the admin e-mail address so I couldn’t even reset the password. The e-mail address was changed to [redacted]. Thankfully I was able to us the phpMyAdmin instructions from this codex article to re-take control of the account and it looks like no damage was done, but this was scary.

We are a group of amateur barbershop singers using this site to organize a barbershop convention and communicate with fellow singers. I can’t imagine there was anything of value to the hacker but still they hacked us.

Has anyone else seen this happen to them? Was it the same person?

Are there any ideas on how I can prevent this from happening again? Is there some functionality to learn how they hacked us? What about to learn what IP address this hacker used and to block them from accessing my site?

Any help you can provide would be great. Don’t want to see this happening again. We are a volunteer organization and don’t have the manpower to deal with this.

Thanks!
Aslam

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

respectyoda
(@respectyoda)

9 years, 8 months ago

I would suggest you to download a security plugin such as iThemes Security or WordFence or All in One Security.

BenSucuri
(@rngdmstr)

9 years, 8 months ago

Yeah malware costs an incredible amount of time and money for website owners. Usually sites are hacked for profit – they’ll use your site to distribute spam or malware.

Glad to hear that you were able to regain control of the site – don’t forget to change all your passwords and update all software (CMS, plugins, themes) on the site since this is the most common reason why sites become infected in the first place.

Also, if your site is on shared hosting then it could have been infected by any of the sites around it. In cases like this there is pretty much nothing you can do to prevent infection except request that your hosting provider help you move your site to a directory which does not have write access by other users/sites on the server.

You’ll definitely want to install a security plugin – as for blocking specific IP’s there’s not much point to doing this since IP’s can easily be spoofed.

Although there is no 100% effective solution to securing a site you’ll want to do your best to ensure that your site is not low-hanging fruit to attackers – keep all software updated, use strong passwords.

The Hack Repair Guy
(@tvcnet)

9 years, 8 months ago

Nicely answered rngdmstr. Kudos!

BenSucuri
(@rngdmstr)

9 years, 8 months ago

Thanks mate 🙂 Just happy to help.

Moderator t-p
(@t-p)

9 years, 8 months ago

Also, have a read of this WP codex:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress