Wordpress footer template hacked badly…
May 9, 2008
Since 4 days ago, one of my blogs which runs with great traffic started showing sign of slowing down. Never have I seen this kind of down turn before, that it seems more like a server issue or something. From 100% to 50% to 20%.
At first, I thought it was something to do with being penalised by Google due to some issues but then I didn’t put much attention as I believe, great content will always rule at the end since it is not the first time Google changed/ tested their algorithms, etc. But then when I scanned through my templates, boom! I realised that the footer template had been modified with huge bunch of spammy codes/ external links to these credit cards, loans website. WTF? Now this is why my site’s been penalised. I have no idea since when this was put in and whoever did that, screw him!
Now, I would not be worried about getting the site’s traffic to recover, more worried about Wordpress security issue. I reckon this has something to do with making your templates writable (chmod 777). I have always done that as it’s convinient to edit templates in the panel but seems like this causes a security issue.
I did some googling and found that many other bloggers had this happened before:
Is your Wordpress Installation Compromised? Al Gore’s is.
WordPress hacked: googlerank.info
Are Hackers Exploiting WordPress Themes?
Wordpress hacked, site penalised
Anyway, good that I finally found the problem and removed that before my site get banned. Though now it lost so much trust from Google, I believe it would take months to recover. Seriously, I can’t express how much anger I am having now….
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