How to Clean a Hacked WordPress Website: Step-by-Step Guide

When your WordPress website gets hacked, you may feel vulnerable and overwhelmed. Statistics estimate that at least 13,000 WordPress websites get hacked in one day. That’s around 9 per minute, 390,000 per month, and 4.7 million per year. However, you can act fast to regain control and protection over your website and prevent it from happening again in the future. 

We will provide a step-by-step guide on how to clean a hacked WordPress website, from identifying the breach to removing malicious code and, finally, hardening your site against future attacks. You will be better placed to restore the integrity of your website and enhance its security once you have the appropriate strategies in place!

Key Takeaways

• Confirm and Identify: It’s crucial to confirm the hack and identify its source to effectively address the vulnerabilities.
• Backup and Restore: Always back up your website before attempting any cleanup to ensure you can recover lost data.
• Change Passwords: Immediately change all passwords and implement two-factor authentication to prevent further unauthorized access.
• Clean and Update: Use security tools to remove malicious code and update WordPress, themes, and plugins to patch vulnerabilities.
• Continuous Monitoring: Regularly scan for vulnerabilities and conduct routine security audits to maintain a secure site.

Understanding the Impact of a Hack

Serious problems may arise, which include data loss and sensitive user credential theft, and even the possibility of getting blacklisted from search engines due to malware presence. In this respect, such breaches not only undermine users’ trust but also show possible vulnerabilities either in the software or in certain parts of it, which, if not urgently fixed, may give even more dangerous exploitation for your website. 

Hacking doesn’t only contribute to short-term technical problems but can hinder the performance of your WordPress site. For example, a malware injection will slow down page loads, which in turn increases bounce rates. It could redirect them to unwanted sites, initiate phishing attacks, and download malware. Besides being frustrating for user experience, these types of security incidents do a lot of harm to trust, in that visitors will be cautious about inputting any personal information or even revisiting the website.

Strong security measures will enhance protection. You can use Polar Mass WordPress Maintenance services to ensure that your WordPress site has regular updates and strong passwords and that you have scheduled security audits set up to prevent hacks. 

Further reading: Is Domain Protection Worth It? An In-depth Analysis

Steps on How to Clean a Hacked WordPress Website

Cleaning a hacked WordPress site requires a lot of caution and a step-by-step procedure to make sure that things are secure and working again. First of all, determine the source of this attack; it could be due to outdated plugins, weak passwords, or even vulnerabilities in your themes.

This will ensure that traces of the malicious code are eliminated, and it always includes restoration from the backup, security tools such as antivirus plugins, and also better security practices to avoid such issues in the future.

Step 1: Confirm the Hack

The first step to recovering from a hacked WordPress website is to confirm that your website has indeed been hacked. Most of the time, this involves error log analysis and understanding where the vulnerabilities that could have been exploited are. You can use several scanning tools, like Google’s Transparency Report to know the current security status of your website. 

Before cleaning up, you need to understand how the breach occurred, be it through phishing attacks, weak passwords, or outdated themes and plugins. You could identify the problems that caused the compromise and start forming a recovery plan that effectively addresses these vulnerabilities.

Another important way is to check access logs, for this will allow you to trace back the abnormal user activities that may indicate an unauthorized access attempt. Monitoring login attempts, especially for any suspicious IP addresses, is part of an effective security measure against hacking.

You can even want to examine recently modified files. There exist many methods to check the recently modified files like reviewing cPanel or SSH.

How to check recently modified files via SSH with the ls command:

1. First log in to your server via SSH. After that change into the home directory for your site.
2. Use the following command:

$ ls -1tlah | head -10

3. View the most recently modified files, starting at the top.

How to Check Recently Modified Files from cPanel:

1. Log in to cPanel and open File Manager.
2. Get into the home directory of your site and click on ‘Last modified’.
3. You will be shown files with recently modified dates starting from the top.

Further reading: What to Do After a Data Breach: Steps to Secure Your Company

Step 2: Backup Your Website

The first step in cleaning a hacked WordPress site is backing up the website. This step is very critical in ensuring that you have a restore point in case something goes wrong and some data is lost. Depending on how bad the hack is, this will give you a secure way to recover all your content, posts, themes, and even configuration database settings—by using a complete site backup. 

You can make manual backups by exporting your content directly from the WordPress dashboard. This ensures that user’s uploads and other information are well covered in the database.

You can also use automated solutions, such as plugins. This way, scheduled backups will execute without continuous monitoring. Automated content backups configured with files and databases for the storing of data may also be created to have an overall site recovery approach. 

Step 3: Change All Passwords

One of the most critical measures that will help secure your WordPress site from hackers is changing all the passwords related to the website, especially its administration account and all user credentials. This is done to prevent further access, mainly in case brute force attacks were done during the hack. Very strong and different passwords for all accounts should be used, and turning on two-factor authentication can improve your security to a great extent.

Furthermore, ensure that the passwords are reset to include complicated combinations of characters, including numbers, symbols, uppercase, and lowercase letters. This will significantly minimize the possibility of future compromises.

Second, access control can be enhanced by the addition of two-factor authentication. By doing this, before accessing an account, a user shall be required to identify themselves through a second method. This dual verification not only provides extra security to the overall system but also enhances confidence among the users that their information is now safe.

Step 4: Clean the Website

Malicious code removal is part of the cleaning process for a hacked WordPress site, as it directly affects security and performance. Upon detecting a hack, security plugins and scanning tools should be used to aid in detecting and removing harmful scripts that may have entered the website. You can use several tools like Malcare or Sucuri Security to do this process. This cleaning process should also involve a proper scanning of a database, themes, and plugins for any traces of infection or vulnerabilities.

You can also manually remove malware by downloading a fresh WordPress installation from the official website and replacing the compromised files with clean versions. Be cautious not to overwrite your wp-config.php file or the wp-content folder, and make sure to have a working backup before starting the process.

Steps to Clean Hacked WordPress Core Files:

1. Identify Your WordPress Version: Locate the version of your WordPress site by checking the wp-includes/version.php file.
2. Download the Matching WordPress Version: Visit the official WordPress site and download the version that corresponds to the one noted in your wp-includes/version.php file.
3. Extract the Files: Unzip the downloaded WordPress installation on your computer.
4. Access Your Site’s File Structure: Log in to your file system through sFTP/FTP or via your hosting account.
5. Replace Infected Core Files: Carefully replace each infected core file with a clean copy from the downloaded installation.

Moreover, you can also try to find someone who can clean your hacked WordPress site professionally. Your account may have already been suspended by your web host and the website taken offline if it has been hacked for a long period. Thus, you can’t simply install a security plugin to clean the hack. An expert like Polar Mass can walk you through getting IPs whitelisted to regain access and consequently install the plugin for cleaning. 

Step 5: Update WordPress and Plugins

Ensuring that WordPress plugins and themes are up-to-date is critical after a hack. This ensures that known vulnerabilities that hackers use to exploit sites are patched. Updating regularly means you’re running the latest version, which usually has inherent security enhancements and near-total coverage against previously identified problems. Keeping your software current will minimize the possibility of infection in the future and guarantee an easier time with your website.

This updating process should not be viewed as some kind of one-time act but rather as a continuous strategy, including planned WordPress maintenance. For the best performance, it would be desirable to set up minor releases to update automatically and test major versions before their upgrading to ensure the compatibility of the latter with your current configuration.

How to Manually Update Plugins & Themes:

1. Access Your Server: Log in to your server using SFTP or SSH.
2. Replace Plugins and Themes: Manually delete and replace plugins and themes with fresh copies from official sources.
3. Check for Updates: Log into WordPress as an admin and navigate to Dashboard > Updates.
4. Apply Updates: Install any updates that are missing.
5. Verify Functionality: Open your website to ensure everything is running smoothly.

Step 6: Scan for Vulnerabilities

Scanning for vulnerabilities is the essential process of cleaning up an infected WordPress website. It helps in finding vulnerabilities that are still prevailing in themes, plugins, and custom code. It thus keeps you ahead of future attacks by conducting continuous security vulnerability assessments.

Setting uptight WordPress security measures will drastically minimize the risk of re-infection. There are plenty of tools available, like Sucuri and Wordfence, offering solutions for vulnerability detection and, besides, actionable intelligence on incident response. These are going to notify the security breaches to the users in real-time.

Running regular risk assessments allows you to identify areas that may need hardening. In this light, website owners should be better placed to stay ahead of the cyber threat. Fixing issues after they arise is undoubtedly insufficient; real vigilance is at the heart of a robust security strategy.

Preventing Future Hacks

To protect a WordPress website from hacking, you need to understand the kind of security to be implemented and the best practices to be followed in ensuring that it addresses the specific needs of the website. 

The very integral component in ensuring security for your site from looming threats is regular maintenance. Regular maintenance includes updating and constant monitoring.

Setting up proper security foundations, applying efficient backup solutions, and educating users about safe practices bring the chance of hacking to a minimum, making your site very strong against possible hacking.

Best Practices for Website Security

Implementing best practices for website security is crucial for protecting your WordPress site from potential hacks and vulnerabilities. Here are some key strategies to enhance your website security:

• Antivirus Plugins and Firewalls: Implement antivirus plugins integrated with strong firewalls that protect against invasion codes and unauthorized access.
• Continuous Monitoring: Continuously monitor your site for any suspicious activity at all times so that you may act on threats as soon as possible.
• Regular Backups: Regularly back up your website to recover it within a quick time with minimal data loss in the case of a cyber-attack.
• User Access Controls: Establish robust access control, basically impersonation based on the role of users. This assists in protecting against internal threats and simultaneously provides the necessary access to sensitive areas.
• Routine Audits: Conduct regular security audits to have an overall review of your security measures, to pick up what has been missed and make sure you have a plan in place to keep your vigil on rising threats.

By integrating these practices, you can create a more secure and resilient WordPress site. 

Summary

Keeping your WordPress site safe is an ongoing process. Vigilance and constant website maintenance are needed. Using the steps above can restore the integrity of your site and prevent further attacks. However, to really make sure that your WordPress site is secure, consider Polar Mass WordPress Maintenance services, in which we update, audit for security, and regularly monitor to keep your site safe from any potential threats!