Saturday, July 6, 2013

Site Hacked: Site Name Changed to "Cheap Viagra"

I have been pretty behind on keeping up with all things WP and might have missed the boat on the latest WP pitfalls, but found it the hard way that my site(s) were hacked on my new server for the first time since .

I have been up to speed on all upgrades, all within 24 hours of release and never over 48 hours. So I am not suggesting the issue is/was related to WordPress, but the only common component of all the sites that were hacked was WP. The way to identify if your site is hacked is to Google the name or a keyword that will pull your site in the SERP, if in the list of names your site appears with a name other than what you have set it to be (in my case it turned out to be Cheap viagra) then you know you are in trouble. One other thing I noticed is that it prevents one from uploading images or media via the built in WordPress Upload/Insert feature while writing or editing a post/page.
The only thing I found that I do not recall adding is an “addhandler php4-script .php” tag in my .htaccess file. Not sure if that was the source of the exploit but I did restore the htaccess files to the original (pre-hack) state and hope for the problem to go away.
If you find you site has similar issues then look in the htaccess file (if you have one) for something like “addhandler php4-script .php”, there is no way for me to tell that is the problem but there seem to be no issue with deleting that line from the file. Hope it helps, leave a comment if you know more on this topic or have had similar experience. - Full Post

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