Many of you over the past few months have experienced the onslaught of Wordpress attacks which has plagued site owners – and loyal fans, alike. I maintain multiple Wordpress blogs in addition to our beloved She-geeks.com site, as well as my clients’ Wordpress blogs. While refraining from too much detail, I had the unfortunate duty of ridding two such Wordpress websites of these Wordpress attacks. While both of the blogs I’m referring to maintained updated software (plugins and core files), they still fell victim to these attacks. The attacks I am referring to primarily affected PHP pages, which would mean that A LOT of sites out there on the internet had the potential for infection. The code would essentially insert itself into each PHP page on your site and/or Wordpress blog and add strings of code which contained “eval(base64_decode“ in some way, shape or form. This script is generally found at the very top of the page’s code – I assume so it hits first.
I spent hours upon hours working to isolate the issues and hand-remove the malicious code only to have it reappear a week later. I ultimately had to bring on the “big dogs” in Wordpress blog security, Sucuri.net. David and the rest of the Sucuri Crew were able to solve all site issues within 30 minutes. It was a beautiful thing. You see, although I managed to remove most of the “malicious eval code” during these attacks myself, there appeared to be a snippet of code eluding my capture. This code, also referred to as a backdoor by many, was hiding in the shadows of unending lines of code. Its really too much code to parse through with the naked eye…nevermind the fact that manual removal like that is likely not the most efficient method when time (and money) is of the essence. What can I say, I was stubborn. Needless to say, the Sucuri Crew was very efficient and truly a life saver on that day.
Below I’ve outlined some of what I found online pertaining to the malicious attacks as well as some portions from my personal experience with the nefarious code.
Some of the malicious strings of code which were present:
“http://holasionweb dot com/oo dot php”
There are a few mentions of solutions you can try but, in the end, the only solution which seemed to work in my case was enlisting Sucuri’s help. However, I’ll list a few better known solutions for this type of Wordpress attack:
- completely deleting your Wordpress install and reinstalling on your hosting account (note: not fun)
- logging into your hosting provider and accessing an CLEAN archive version of your website. (note: you’d need to know an archived date in which your blog was completely clean and free of the bad code)
- Sucuri offers a free “cleaning” script which you can run yourself and seems to have helped quite a few people resolve their issues
Additional documented information which may prove useful for others is shown below. You may see some similarities. If you’ve collected any additional information or have a similar story to share, we’re all ears.
More information on Sucuri Security:
“Sucuri Security is the leading provider of web-based integrity monitoring and malware detection solutions – delivered as a service. Sucuri solutions are deployed remotely in a matter of minutes anywhere in the world, allowing our customers to immediately detect web-based malware and monitor their internet presence. Sucuri’s web monitoring solution is used today by more than 8,000 sites worldwide. Sucuri was founded in 2008.
In simple terms, we clean up the mess. If your site got hacked, blacklisted or infected with malware, we fix it for you. If your site is clean, we monitor it to let you know if a problem ever happens. We work fast, we are affordable and we get things done.”
Click here to check them out: 
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