We will explain why you may not notice that your WordPress site has been tampered with and how to create a mechanism for early detection.
Why you may not notice that your WordPress site has been tampered with.
Increasingly, WordPress sites are hacked and defaced and go unnoticed for long periods of time. The reason for this is that malware may have mechanisms in place to hide the defacement of the site from the administrator, or it may only manifest itself in rare instances.
Such stealthy malware often has the following features
Symptoms appear only when the site is accessed from Google search results.
Once symptoms (such as misdirection to other sites) appear, COOKIE is used to prevent symptoms from appearing for a while.
The system is designed so that users who are logged in with administrator privileges do not experience symptoms.
Even if illegal links are inserted in the site by SEO spam, they are hidden by transparency or extremely small display on the appearance of the site.
What should I do if I receive a complaint from a customer that the site jumps to an incorrect page without their permission, or that they cannot view the site?
If you receive such a complaint, the site administrator can check the symptoms and find that the symptoms do not occur while logged in, or the malware may have already been configured to prevent the symptoms from occurring when accessed from your IP address.
In such cases, we recommend that you first check to see if the symptoms really do not occur by using the following methods.
1. Log out of the WordPress site.
2. Delete all cache and cookies in incognito mode or in your browser.
3. Access the site again to check for any unauthorized behavior.
4. Delete all browser cache and cookies again.
5. Enter the URL of your site into a search engine and click on the link in the search results to see if any malware symptoms appear.
6. Check the above on your smartphone as well (some malware may only show symptoms on smartphones).
We also recommend using an external inspection site such as Sucuri SItecheck.
(This site simulates access from Google to externally detect malware on your site, so you can think of it as automatically performing the above checks.)
https://malware-scan.website-malware-removal.com/
The best way to detect malware is to exhaustively inspect every file from the inside of the site
External inspection tools, such as Sucuri, have much lower detection rates than those that exhaustively inspect files from within the site.
In general, the code that creates the output (the malware itself) is always present somewhere, rather than the code that expresses the symptoms of the malware’s output, and is characterized by very long code, making it much easier to detect.
Please use a plugin that performs a comprehensive scan of your WordPress site for malware from the inside.
Free WordPress:Malware Scan & Security Plugin [Malware and Virus Detection and Removal].
Automatically scans for malware infection and notifies you automatically.
Free WordPress:Malware Scan & Security Plugin [Malware and Virus Detection and Removal]. will automatically scan for malware at any time during the night and notify you automatically at the email address you set.
We hope you find this information useful.
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