What is Malicious Redirect
A definition by FixMyWP.com | WordPress Support and Maintenance Services.
- Upload or create a file in your WordPress site with the malicious script encoded.
- Add themselves as a Ghost Admin on your website.
- Execute PHP code they send through a browser.
- Collect personal information like Email, for spam purposes.
- Change anything on your website for their own purposes, often for spamming.
If a file is added, it’s often named to look like a legitimate file like that’s the part of WordPress core files. The file could be named sunrise.php, wp-users.php, wp-system or wp-configuration.php or something similar. Typically hackers add the malicious scripts to .htaccess, wp-includes, wp-content/themes, wp-content/plugins or wp-content/uploads folders, or may also change your wp-config.php file.
What Does Blacklisting Look Like?
So, we’ve already talked about the methods you may check and find out if your website has been injected with malicious scripts, but I feel like it’s a good idea to spend additional time in what we refer to in one of our previous articles as the “symptoms” of a site being hacked and blacklisted. Not every blacklisted website will exhibit those signs, however most of them can help you find out if your site is in trouble:
- There is a huge/sudden traffic to your website for specific keywords that have nothing to do with your website content – particularly related to pharmaceuticals.
- Your site is suddenly redirecting to anonymous websites not in your possession.
- Ghost Administrators appear in your website’s dashboard who weren’t created by you or other legitimate admin users.
- Your website is unexpectedly flagged as containing malware in search engine results or by desktop or cellular anti-virus detection software program.
- Your hosting provider moved your website to junk or quarantine mode.
It’s important to keep in mind that Google can provide various safety warnings as well. These warnings may appear in the search engine results page where your website is indexed. Most common warnings you will see are listed below.
Read this Step-by-Step Guide For Removing The Malicious Scripts And Redirections and do not let ignorance kill your digital work! Fix my WordPress Team know how to deal with any kind of harmful attacks against your website. If code looks like impossible to handle, then call FixMyWp to do the heavy work!
Keeping Your Site Secure
In order to keep your site secure you need to make sure you follow the guidelines found below:
- Have your WordPress site core files updated.
- Have your themes and plugins updated.
- Use a Safe Secure WordPress Hosting Service, if possible choose one which can Manage your WordPress Site instead of just from Hosting it.
- If you choose to use a reseller hosting account under a non WordPress Friendly Hosting Provider then you should avoid adding sites as addons under your main account. You can setup those sites in a separate site account.
- Remove any inactive themes or plugins you don’t plan to use in your site.
- Review your WordPress plugins and themes and make sure all of them are recently updated by its developers, if not you should seek some alternatives and remove them from your WordPress Site.
- Never install nulled themes or plugins.
- Keep one or two admin accounts, downgrade the rest of your admin users into an author or an editor.
- Remove all dev/demo setups of your WordPress installation outside your public directory.
WordPress Malware Removal Services
FixMyWP has successfully cleaned more than 500 WordPress sites already while its success rate is 100%. If you don’t have time or the expertise to scan and clean your WordPress site from a Malware Redirect hack then we can clean it for you.
This is a priority service that will restore your WordPress Hacked Website in a day or less while we are going to offer you a 30 day guarantee period. If your website is hacked again during the guarantee period we will clean it Free of Charge.
Read more about WordPress Hacked Fix Services.