WordPress Hacking Alert

[WordPlay]

I discovered yesterday that my movie blog was hacked two months ago and had over 400 links to content on a hacked server at the math department of a French university. Each page of the content was related to DVD sales of a specific movie, so these hackers obviously went out looking for movie blogs to exploit.

If you have a WordPress movie or entertainment blog, you might want to run the WordPress Exploit Scanner plugin. In my case, there were two php files that had to be removed (fotter.php and inclode.php) and many other infected files that had to be replaced from my hard drive. When I was done I checked the site at http://validator.w3.org/checklink to make sure all the links were gone.

This type of exploit obviously happens in lots of other niches, but movie blogs are particularly vulnerable to this version because the hackers put a lot of time put into developing movie-specific content.

Frigging hackers.

[korprit]

thanks to your heads up, i found a second hack on my movie site. the first i found a few weeks ago and found some 'shadowed' admin accounts. They were untouchable and all but impossible to see from the admin panel, but the database had entries for the accounts and i had to manually remove them and then repair a compromised file.

the latter, my header was compromised and therewas one of those 'invisible' links at th etop. margins were adjusted to make the link invisible to all but spiders. looks like a competitive breach IMO since that is considered blackhat and can get you deindexed. the site it linked two was a junk site that was also, NOT indexed.

[Scooter]

I just recently experienced having some asshole hacked into my site and uploaded some files in the cPanel...
The Hostgator police quickly resolved the issue, and an IP trace shows the two culprits to be located in:

Hungary
City: PECS
Region/State: BARANYA

Slovenia
City: CELJE
Region/State: CELJE

[WordPlay]

How did you discover the hack?

[Scooter]

Well, I received a spring special invitation from one of my affiliates, and upon updating the widget code I was going to check that it nested correctly... The site would not come up! I was notified through online chat that some file was mis-configured. So it was fixed and I struck it up as "oh well", just a glitch.
Then a week later I go to visit my site and this is the message I get when the home page loaded "Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /home/scooter1/public_html/index.php on line 1"
So whoever it was, they were uploading a files or files and screwed something up.

[WordPlay]

Thanks for the info. I figure the more I learn about how these wackos work, the more I can protect my sites.

[Scooter]

Just make sure you have a very, very good password for both cPanel and the site as well...

...Now it turns out that there are some glitches in my wordpress publishing area -- can't upload images! I'm not sure if its the template files, or the mechanics of wordpress itself, but it really sucks -- I'll have to do it manually within HTML until I figure it out.
Would you happen to know how I can repair the WP mechanics in my publisher?

~Scott

[WordPlay]

Sorry, I'm not much of a mechanic. But try using Windows Live Writer to add your photos. I always use it when I upload photos because it's a lot more flexible than the WordPress interface.