index.php Files with the Comment “Silence is golden.” on a WordPress Website Are Not Malware

When it comes to dealing with hacked websites a lot of people would be best off leaving it to professionals (assuming you can find one, among all the unqualified companies), as it is easy for people to get very confused about what is going on. We recently had someone contact us about cleaning up a hacked WordPress website where they were saying that part of the malware was that index.php files had been corrupted with “Silence is golden.” and nothing else.

What they were referring to are files that come with WordPress that had the following contents:

<?php
// Silence is golden.

The purpose of those files is to make sure that a listing of files in the directory they are located is not shown in certain server configurations. So those files are harmless and not in any way malware.

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