Unhacking a WordPress site¶

This is an INCOMPLETE guide, but a good starting point! It doesn't cover removing malicious code inserted into the database, for instance.

WordPress gets hacked - a lot. And the correct solution is to restore your database and filesystem from backup. However, sometimes we deal with sites that weren't responsibly managed, and that's not an option. Here's a guide on what to do.

First - if it IS an option, delete your WordPress filesystem and restore from known good files. There's just too many ways to obfuscate a hack, so these approaches are necessarily incomplete.

• Search for suspicious PHP commands:
  

  grep -r gzuncompress *
  grep -r base64_decode *
  grep -r eval( *
  grep -r str_rev *
  

Not every instance of these commands is malicious! However, a hacked site will often use these, so look at what comes after them. If it's a long base64 block, that's bad news.

Note that there are MANY ways to obscure the commands above. Here are some example strings you can also search for

"base" . "64_decode" 
eval/*

That last one's tricky. It found this command: eval/*boguscomment*/('malicious_command').

• Check for this:
  

  <?php eval(get_option("\x72\x65\x6e\x64\x65\x72")); ?>
  

That evaluates to:

<?php eval(get_option("render")); ?>

This indicates that there's malicious code in your database, and this minimal change allows the code to render.

Here's the commands I used to remove that from my entire codebase:

find -name \*php -exec sed -i 's/<?php eval(get_option("\\x72\\x65\\x6e\\x64\\x65\\x72")); ?>//g' {} \;
find -name \*.html -exec sed -i 's/<?php eval(get_option("\\x72\\x65\\x6e\\x64\\x65\\x72")); ?>//g' {} \;

• Look for function names you discovered with the last command and grep for those. I found commands like "ruburat" and "ukonabuh" which I then searched for.
• Use git reset --hard HEAD, if you're using git.
• Don't assume git will remove everything! I found php files in places not checked by git. E.g. in the .git folder, to wp-config.php and civicrm.settings.php, wp-content/uploads. Here are some commands to help you find php files where they don't belong (run from webroot):
  

  find .git -name \*php
  find wp-content/uploads -name \*php