Unauthorized Access

  • myvhoa

    (@myvhoa)


    8 years ago

    My URL is vhoasatx.com and it is built with a modified Polray theme.

    Had a user forum for my wordpress web site and beginning Monday and as of today, I have had approximately 400-500 new users register for the site and left messages that have nothing to do with my site or any information in my site. These posts range from pornographic to kids stuff. I shut down the user forum and took it off my menu, deleted all the users, deleted the discussion page, and removed all i could from the site that would have anything to remotely do with user registration which was never required in the first place. I am still getting new user registration at the rate of about 1 per every 5 minutes. I have looked at the site and cannot find anyway for this to happen but new users are appearing on a user page in my wordpress theme. How can I stop this short of taking the web site off line?

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Thread Starter myvhoa

    (@myvhoa)

    8 years ago

    Update: since I removed the forum page, new users are not able to post content, but still getting new user registrations occurring. The list is growing fairly rapidly and need to get it shut down somehow.

    Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    8 years ago

    You should be able to stop new registrations by unchecking “Anyone can register” in General Settings. It’s possible the forum plugin or another plugin is overriding this setting, still allowing registrations. Try deactivating all plugins temporarily to be sure there is no outside influence on default WP behavior.

    If you still get registrations in the no-plugins state with anyone can register unchecked, there is some sort of backdoor put in place by a hacker. In that case you need to follow normal hack recovery procedures.

    Once the influx has been stopped, you need to find a way to allow registrations without opening up your site to every bad actor out there. One possibility is requiring that a CAPTCHA be solved before allowing registrations. There are other possibilities, search through the plugins repository.

    Thread Starter myvhoa

    (@myvhoa)

    8 years ago

    Thank you for the response and suggestion. I did uncheck that block yesterday and new registrations continued. Woke up this morning and had about 150 new ones. Was beside myself and totally frustrated. I was going to reinstall a backup done a couple of weeks ago and spent some time reading up on it. Oddly enough, I have not gotten any new uses for over 6 hours o fingers crossed I have finally put an end to it. Why it took overnight to stop it I do not know. Will watch for a couple of days and see what happens.

    Th good news is that the user forum was a “nice to have” and not a necessity so worst case scenario is I leave it turned off.

    Thanks again

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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