gorgon80

As I expected my web host reported no problems with my site:

Our scan for malicious PHP shells using our internal tool has finished and did not identify any potentially malicious files.

So unless I hear something back from Google I’m going to simply disregard their messages about not complying with their terms of use. I anyone has any better ideas I’m happy to hear them.

OK – my latest theory: since Google is not looking at the contents of the ZIP files, the only thing they can base their judgement on is the names of the files Updraft uploads. So – is there a way to change or control the names of the uploaded files? I haven’t checked that yet, but I will.

Edit: well, if there is a way to change the names of the uploaded files I can’t find it.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by gorgon80.

Thanks for taking the time to review my situation. I read and understand your message and I will relay the basic facts to my web host. I don’t contact them very often, but when I do I have always received good feedback and help. I’ll post their response here when I get it.

There are still a few things about this whole issue that I don’t understand:

1. My entire website, of which the WordPress blog is just a part, is not very active in terms of updates. When I started getting the warning messages from Google (months ago) I was surprised because nothing in the site had changed for some time. Obviously something did change somewhere, but I have no idea what it might have been.
2. I’ve been using Updraft to back up my site for a long time – years actually. I keep it, along with all of the other add-ons, up to date.
3. For each of Google’s warning messages I have responded with a request to “verify” the results, but I have never heard anything back from Google. This makes me think the problem they report is being triggered by some very obscure situation that is actually not a problem at all.

I’ll make a new post with whatever my web host comes up with.

Well, thanks for that analysis. If you are correct it raises a couple of issues for me:

1. My website is fairly static and hasn’t been updated in quite a while. I’m not sure when this problem first started, but whenever it was I don’t think I have a backup from before that time.
2. I have keyed in all the pages of my site, and made all the images, so I’m quite sure I didn’t do anything to infect the site. Of course I have no idea what might be in any of the plugins.
3. I know how to scan for viruses in Windows, but I have no idea how to scan a WordPress site. And would you believe I don’t actually know where my sites’s WordPress content is located.
4. The fact that I have received quite a few of the Google warning messages and requested a review for each one of them, but never had any reply from Google about any of them suggests to me the problem may be being triggered by the fact that the backup files are compressed, or that Google is checking them by un-compressing them and not recognizing what they contain. It seems to me that if Google found something in the backups that they thought was a virus they would tell that to me. But they have never done that.
5. If there is a virus somewhere in the backups, why has no one who accesses the site reported a problem? I scan my PC fairly regularly with a number of different AV programs, and it is always clean.

The bottom line is I sincerely appreciate the time and effort you’ve taken to investigate this issue, but it’s totally unclear to me what I should do about it now, of if I should do anything at all.

Aha! I didn’t realize the 3 dots were clickable. Thanks for pointing that out.

I backed up just the plugins and saved that file on my Google drive where all the regular backups are located. The file is 38.8 MB and I made it publicly sharable. Here is the link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MINUARcycpovkDcDxt149vQbWG9KRtJT/view?usp=sharing

Let me know if you have any problems retrieving it.

Bad news: Udraft just made a new backup that completed successfully. And about 4 min. later I got another one of those nasty Google messages. But before making the backup I removed the redux add-on from my site.

So it’s not that – it’s something else.

Talk about deja vu.

Updraft did another backpack last night. And I got 2 more nasty messages from Google.