How to Clean a Hacked WordPress Site?

WordPress is one of the most accessible and easiest ways to create blogs or one’s website. It is highly preferred these days as it helps one to create a website without any knowledge of deep technicality or a programming language. Therefore around 70% of the websites today are powered by WordPress. Being one of the powerful websites developing places it is always eyed by the hackers too!!! This makes it easy for hackers to access various attractive websites from numerous arenas to hack. Therefore, WordPress needs time to time scanning and cleaning too.

Steps to Clean a Hacked WordPress Site Manually

1. Identify the Malicious Plugins and codes – Malware Scan the WordPress site and locate the malicious codes and plugins. This helps to differentiate the original and the manipulated content.

2. Log in to the server with the help of SFTP or SSH – SFTP and SSH are one of the safest ways to open or transfer a file. Data sent via the internet have high chances of being hacked and the data can easily tamper. Hence to avoid this SFTP and SSH helps to create a shield around the data that cannot be hacked or manipulated easily by hackers.

3. Identify the changed files – Having a check at the changed files gives an accuracy of the malicious codes and the hacked content that needs to be removed.

4. Note the date of the changed files and the user ID – This helps one to identify the time when the files were hanged and also gives an idea about the number of files changed from the particular date.

5. Download the suspicious files from the WordPress repository – This helps to clean the hacked site and identify the malicious codes entered by the hacker.

6. Open a premium file with the help of a text editor.

7. Remove Malicious Codes – Removal of malicious codes help to bring the site online without any blockages or irrelevant content.
8. Cross Check – Cross check the website and check whether it is still operational or not.

Cleaning the Hacked Website Database Tables

1. Log into the hacked WordPress database table.
2. Backup the data – Backup of the files helps to save them before and avoid deleting important files along with the unnecessary ones. Hence never forget to get a reliable backup.
3. Search the Malicious content – Search the malicious codes and files that are running on the website and that can be the reason for the website being online by the web host.
4. Open the Hacked Table – This helps to identify the malicious content in bulk and get the database table free of malware and suspicious content.
5. Remove malicious files – After identification of malicious content remove them to run the website safe and successfully back again or use fix my hacked website service to remove malicious files from your WordPress website.
6. Operational Check – After removal of the malware content one can have a check at the website and its successful operation.
7. Remove the database access tools – This helps to avoid hacking and allows one to keep the database information safe and secured.

Limit WordPress User Account

Limiting the WordPress user accounts helps to keep the site safe and secured. In case of identification of any unknown user immediately remove it so that the hacker is unable to hack personal and confidential information. It is also advised to have one admin user and allow other users with the least privileges to make changes to the website. This level ups the security of the website.

Steps to Manually Remove the Suspicious Users from WordPress

1. Backup the Database Content – This helps to keep the original data safe and avoid missing the original data. 
2. Log in WordPress – Log in to WordPress as an admin and then have a check at the users using the website to change the content. This helps to identify the unknown user and get rid of them from making unnecessary changes. 
3. Delete the Unknown User – After identification of the unknown user using the WordPress delete them to avoid further hacking of the important information. 
4. Reset User Password – Reset the user password. This helps to avoid hackers hacking the account and misusing the information available on the website.

Remove Harmful Backdoors

Backdoor is one of the easiest ways to re-hack a website. Hence, it is vital to identify the harmful backdoor and close it to prevent further hacking of the vital data. Hackers often name the backdoors by official core files of WordPress to merge them with the original ones. But those files are located in the wrong directories. Hackers also inject malicious backdoors into the files to manipulate the original data. 

Removal of Spam Warnings

If your website is still blocked by any of the web spam authorities it is advised to ask them for a review after cleaning the malicious content from the files.

Removal of Malware Warnings:

1. After cleaning the malicious content from the whole website, it is advised to request the website hosting company to remove the suspension.
2. The next step is to fill a form of each block listing authority to get the website back into the business.

Avoid Future WordPress Hacks

To avoid future WordPress hack, one need to follow the mentioned steps:

1. Update configuration settings
2. Change user passwords
3. New secret keys
4. Harden the WordPress
5. Backup of the original data
6. Install verified and reliable anti-virus for your system
7. Use a reliable Web application firewall