One of the most common WordPress malware patterns I’ve cleaned in the last two years isn’t a webshell or a credential stealer — it’s a “fake plugin” or “fake theme.” The attacker creates a directory in wp-content/plugins/ or wp-content/themes/ with …
Tag: WORDPRESS
The one SQL query that catches almost every backdoor admin in WordPress
If a WordPress site of yours has been compromised — even briefly, even silently — there’s a very good chance it now has at least one administrator account that you didn’t create. Most WP malware families plant one as part …
Block xmlrpc.php and hide wp-login.php server-wide on OpenLiteSpeed
Every WordPress site running with default config is being hammered right now by brute-force scripts hitting xmlrpc.php and wp-login.php. If you run multiple sites on a single OpenLiteSpeed (LSWS) box, dropping a per-site .htaccess rule on each one is …
Get WordPress off MySQL root: per-site users in one Python loop
If you run more than one WordPress site on a single server and every wp-config.php has DB_USER = 'root', your eight sites are effectively one site as far as a compromise is concerned. One vulnerable plugin on any of …
Block WordPress REST API user enumeration without breaking the admin
By default every WordPress install since 4.7 leaks usernames over a public, unauthenticated REST endpoint. Anyone — no login, no auth header, just a browser — can hit https://yoursite.com/wp-json/wp/v2/users and get a JSON array of every user the site considers …
Recovering a malformed wp_options.active_plugins: the SQL REPLACE() trap and how to rebuild
You have a WordPress site that’s returning HTTP 200, the homepage renders, but something’s quietly off. WooCommerce features aren’t loading. LiteSpeed Cache settings page is empty. The Mailpoet sender isn’t sending. None of these would normally fail at the same …
Block PHP execution in wp-content/uploads on OpenLiteSpeed: the right .htaccess snippet
wp-content/uploads/ is the most predictable target on a WordPress install. It’s writable by the web server (so any compromise that gets a file uploaded lands here), it’s almost never inspected by malware scanners with the same vigilance as wp-includes/, …
The .hph extension trick: how WordPress malware survives cleanups by shadowing .php files
You clean a WordPress malware infection. You find every .php file with the suspicious signature, quarantine it, restore from backup, harden the site. Three weeks later the same backdoor is back. Same filename, same content, same behavior. You’re sure you …
Patching abandoned WordPress themes for PHP 8: the widget constructor fix
You upgrade an OpenLiteSpeed box from PHP 7.4 to PHP 8.2, the four sites running mainstream themes come up clean, and the fifth — running a 2013-era premium theme that hasn’t been touched by its author since 2018 — throws …
Wordfence forensics: mining wp_wfhits and wp_wfissues to reconstruct a breach timeline
If you’re cleaning up a WordPress compromise and the site has Wordfence installed, you have more forensic data than you think. Even on the free plan, Wordfence quietly logs every blocked request, every plugin-vulnerability advisory, every flagged file, and every …