This past weekend, one audacious hacker decided to hack more than ten thousand websites built on the WordPress platform (including many of our own), inserting the creative greeting, “You’ve been hacked…” and presumably his own portrait on the homepage to inform the surprised viewer of his obvious and invasive presence.
Though unwanted and unexpected, the hacker’s technique was actually pretty rudimentary, in which he most likely wrote one script which he applied to all the vulnerable sites. This script would change the index of the site’s active theme and also randomly change a few basic settings of the site, such as PermaLink structure.
How and/or why did this outrageous phenomenon occur?
Although we cannot pinpoint one specific reason, security vulnerability is the most likely one. Way back in April, WordPress’s password security was breached, leading to the loss of users’ private information and passwords. WordPress managed to fix their infrastructure and offered a new version of the platform with updated security measures for its users.
Today’s incidence emphasizes the tremendous importance of keeping a site’s WordPress core installation up to date. While we cannot trace this particular hack to the one from April, it is a good reminder to make sure that all new security measures have been set in place for your site and that it is protected from hackers who may still possess previously leaked information. If you do nothing else with your site, at least make sure that it maintains the latest core installation version of WordPress to prevent things like this from happening to you.
However, if this did happen to you, then fear not. WordPress offers this FAQ Page for what you can do when your site is hacked. If you have trouble restoring your own site and undoing the changes wrought by an unwanted hacker, then contact us and we will be more than happy to help you.
Feel free to share about your horrible hack stories and offer advice and suggestions about how to maintain your site hack-free!