If your WordPress website has been hacked and contains malware, a common suggestion for cleaning it up is to use the Wordfence Security plugin. There are a number of problems with that. One being that it won’t necessarily catch all the malware, as someone looking for help with the plugin recently noted:
Hello, I’m using the free version and I’m doing daily scans because my site has a malware. At some point the scan did not detect some new folders that have been created in the root folder.
The folders has some random characters as an name and it contains an index file and a cache folder.
The larger problem with what they were bringing up there is that if you had cleaned up the malware, there wouldn’t even be more malware to possibly detect day after day. So something has gone wrong there.
If there is malware on a WordPress website, the focus shouldn’t be on removing the malware, though it does need to be removed. It should be how it got there, which is something that Wordfence Security can’t determine. When the plugin removes the files without determining that, it makes it harder to figure out.
Another important reason for trying to figure out how the website was infected, which have seen over and over in years of being brought in to re-clean hacked WordPress websites, is that in doing the work to try to figure out how the website was hacked, you often find malware or other malicious code that otherwise would have been missed.
Figuring out how the malware got there in the first place or at least stopping it from getting back in basic part of a proper hack cleanup, but something that many security providers, including the developer of Wordfence Security, either don’t do or fail to accomplish.
