Brecht Ryckaert

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Tag: wordpress

How to clean your hacked WordPress site?

Your site is hacked. What to do next? A lot of people will tell you just to restore a backup. But what most people do not take into account is that the original hack and the deployment of all malware isn’t always on the very same moment.

There’s a trend (that has surfaced and increased in popularity over the last 2 years) where a hacker finds a vulnerability, exploits it and injects a backdoor into your WordPress site. Next, they wait a couple of weeks or months. Once they’re sure you no longer have a non-infected backup, they use this backdoor to deploy the real malware to your website.

At this point, restoring a backup has become entirely useless. That’s why it’s better to clean your site than using a backup as a fallback (as you’d also be restoring the backdoor that allows the hacker to infect your site again afterwards).

So let’s learn how to clean your hacked WordPress site.

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Announcing WP Sweeper

WP Sweeper - Cleaning Script for Hacked WordPress Sites

“A new way to clean hacked WordPress sites”

I’ve spent the past couple of years learning and writing shell scripts. I’m also passionate about WordPress. As I’m often asked to clean hacked WordPress sites, I started to work on a script that automates this in a world where Corona still was just a beer.

Today I’m ready to announce WP Sweeper.

WP Sweeper shell script for cleaning hacked WordPress sites
WP Sweeper in action
Discover WP Sweeper

It’s a shell script that automates a lot of the tasks needed to clean a hacked WordPress sites. I’ve used this to clean more than a thousand sites. And now I’m unleashing my project onto the world, making it available for everyone.

Functionality

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Improving WordPress security with the .htaccess

In this article I’ll share some of the security tweaks I tend to add to the .htaccess to improve security of the WordPress-installation.

Hide the wp-config.php file

Since the wp-config.php file contains our database credentials, we do not want this file to be accessible, PERIOD. So by adding this snippet to our .htaccess file we can prevent access to it:

#hide wp-config file
<files wp-config.php>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>

This rule will prevent that the wp-config.php is accessible.

Hide the .htaccess file itself

Preventing abuse by adding rules to our .htaccess is only useful if the .htaccess can’t be compromised itself.

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A small bash backup script for WordPress

As most of you know I work as an Escalation Engineer at Combell.com. Recently I crafted a tiny backup script that makes backups of my own site. While this script is optimized for use on shared servers at Combell.com, it can easily be adapted to be used anywhere.

#!/bin/bash

#### Settings ####
NOW=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d-%H%M")
FULL_PATH=$(pwd)
BACKUP_FOLDER=$FULL_PATH/data/

#### Site-specific Info ####
SITE_PATH="www" #Could also be subsites/subsitename
DB_NAME=`cat $SITE_PATH/wp-config.php | grep DB_NAME | cut -d \' -f 4`
DB_USER=`cat $SITE_PATH/wp-config.php | grep DB_USER | cut -d \' -f 4`
DB_PASS=`cat $SITE_PATH/wp-config.php | grep DB_PASSWORD | cut -d \' -f 4`
DB_HOST=`cat $SITE_PATH/wp-config.php | grep DB_HOST | cut -d \' -f 4`

#### Files backup ####

function files_backup {
    zip -r $SITE_PATH.$NOW.zip $SITE_PATH
    mv $SITE_PATH.$NOW.zip $BACKUP_FOLDER
}

#### Database Backup ####
function database_backup {
    mysqldump -h $DB_HOST -u$DB_USER -p$DB_PASS $DB_NAME > $DB_NAME.$NOW.sql
    mv $DB_NAME.$NOW.sql data/$DB_NAME.$NOW.sql
}

#### Runner Class ####
files_backup
database_backup

This script can be run automatically on a Combell-server by adding a cron for this script. You can do this in /etc/crontab by adding for example this: 

0 */6 * * * /bin/sh /data/sites/web/youraccountname/backup.sh

The cron above will create a backup every six hours. Do not forget to put this backup.sh script in the root of your account.

Hope this helps you guys.

PS: the FULL_PATH variable is already included since I’m planning to iterate on this script and add more features, even though it’s currently only used to declare the backup directory path.

Using WordPress as a static site generator

This weekend I spoke at WordCamp Nijmegen in The Netherlands. Below you can find my slides for that presentation.

Using WordPress as a Static Site Generator from Brecht Ryckaert