When it comes to\u00a0dealing with hacked websites our experience is that information coming from web hosts often isn’t great.\u00a0When you consider how terrible many security companies dealing with websites are, it isn’t very surprising that companies that don’t claim that expertise would be bad as well.<\/p>\n
Last week over on the blog for our Plugin Vulnerabilities service we discussed<\/a> one issue that comes up from time to time, which is web hosts claiming that the source of a hack is whatever software that happens to be located where a hacker placed a malicious file. Often times the hacker just randomly place their malicious files, making the location of the file a weak piece of evidence as to the source of the hack in most cases.<\/p>\n Another recent example of this involved someone who contacted about a website that was hacked, cleaned, and then was getting re-infected everyday. In that situation our first question is always if\u00a0the person that cleaned up the website determine how it was hacked. Seeing as someone doing a cleanup should attempt to determine how a website was hacked, that will tell you if the person doing the cleanup was doing things properly (the response almost always indicates they haven’t). It also important since the re-hacking could indicate that the security vulnerability that allowed the website has not been fixed and knowing what was believed was the cause would provide a better understanding of the situation.<\/p>\n In this case\u00a0they said that there web host had been hacked through a backdoor (apparently the person that did the cleanup did not determine how the website was hacked). For those not familiar a backdoor would be code that allows a hacker remote access to the website internals. In most cases a backdoor could not be source of a hack since the backdoor would have to have gotten on the website. Usually the hacker will exploit a vulnerability to allow them to place a backdoor on a website and then use the backdoor to perform further actions on the website, so the backdoor isn’t the source of the hacking, only a result of it.<\/p>\n The main exception to this is that occasionally a malicious individual will be able to plant a backdoor into non-malicious code, say sneaking it in to an otherwise legitimate WordPress plugin in the Plugin Directory. That is by no means a common occurrence though.<\/p>\n If your web host or someone else is telling you your website was hacked through a backdoor, you should ask them how it got there to understand if they are correct about the source of if they failed to understand the actual source.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When it comes to\u00a0dealing with hacked websites our experience is that information coming from web hosts often isn’t great.\u00a0When you consider how terrible many security companies dealing with websites are, it isn’t very surprising that companies that don’t claim that expertise would be bad as well. Last week over on the blog for our Plugin … Continue reading “Your Website Probably Wasn’t Hacked Through A Backdoor”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-website-hacked"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2705"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2705\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2707,"href":"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2705\/revisions\/2707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}