Is Your WordPress “Viagra Spammers and Hackers” Proof?

By Vlad Zablotskyy March 5, 2009

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I often wonder what is worse? Having a server down time or having your blog hacked by a spammer? I would prefer a server down time over having my blog(s) hacked by spammers any time of night or day.

Recently I have been helping a friend of mine after her blog was hacked by a viagra spammer. I am sure some of my readers can benefit from the things I have learned.

How Do You Know If Your Blog Is Hacked?

It can take days or weeks before you can discover that your blog was compromised. But following are red flags you should pay attention to:

Your blog’s performance suddenly decreases. It takes forever for pages to load in your browser. It can be due to the fact that a PHP scripted inserted in your blog’s theme files is trying to “pull in” hundreds and even thousands of slinks. Your blogg may appear to you and your visitors the same, but if you take a closer look at the source of your pages you might see the link spam.
The number of regular daily visitors suddenly drops. This can be due to two factors:
- Visitors become impatient that your pages take so long to load and move on.
- Your search engines raking and position may be affected resulting in less
traffic.
If you are regularly using an FTP client, pay attention if there are any suspicious files on your server.

Things you can do to help you out to make you blog less attractive to “viagra spamers and hackers”.

Always have the latest version of WordPress. Yes updating WordPress in the past was rather painful task. But there is no longer excuse not to update it your software since you can do it straight from your Dashboard.
If you still are afraid to upgrade your WordPress on thing you can do is to stop publicizing to the entire world which version you are actually using. Many theme developers please a code in the header of your blog that produces following result:

You can fix this rather easy by removing following code from the header.php file of your current theme:

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo(‘version’); ?>" />

In my opinion, it would be better to show your love and appreciation for WordPress by linking to them.
One of the ways you can find out your blog has been hacked is to set up a Google Alert for the following query “viagra site:www.yoursite.com”. Of course you can substitute keyword “viagra” with any other keyword you think your site might be targeted with.

It is probably impossible to prevent your blog from being hack at certain point, but there are few things you can do to make your blog less attractive to spammers and hackers.

If you need more advanced approach to dealing with spam hackers, I highly recommend to read “New Wordpress Hacking Strategy Using Cloaking to Target Google IP Addresses” by Aaron Wall

WordPress, WordPress Security