Hackers have long been known for their tendency to identify weaknesses in programs, but in today’s world, there are a number of programs that people put to use which are incredibly easy to keep safe. CMS or Content Management Systems are standard on the web today, being the software that runs blogs from all over the world. Two common examples of this are Joomla and WordPress, loved by users globally for their ease of use and high number of features. While these blogs are certainly a good way to get content out to the public, they do need to be updated with patches just as soon as those patches are made available because hackers do look for ways to exploit these programs and attack the web application security. While users might be aware that patching is needed, all too often it is not kept up with and when that happens, big problems can arise. SySmox experienced such a problem when a number of users who had not kept with the patching for their Joomla and WordPress installations unwittingly played a role in helping hackers attack the ISP’s shared hosting servers. The hackers were able to run scripts that caused problems and forced the tech support team to go to battle against the scripts to regain control over the servers by exploiting vulnerabilities in the kernel.

(continue reading…)

 A  hacked website costs you readers, search engine rank and time and money.
Use these tips to help you find and clean a WordPress website from hacked code and malicious malware links inserted into the website code.

Wordpress hacking

WordPress vulnerabilities ; SQL injection, JavaScript insertion and.htaccess hacks are all common ways to alter the content on your WordPress website.Some hackers redirect users to another website, other hackers insert malicious links and some other hackers use the .htaccess file to steal Google rank. If you think you are hacked, here are some common sings to search for in your website code.

Check Your.htaccess File :

The .htaccess file is always in the root dlretory of your
WordPress site. The .htaccess file lets you control how the
server handles website requests such as Google crawler
access and URL redirections Hackers who gain access to the
.htaccess file insert a few lines of code that redirect
search englnes. The hacked code detects the “user
agent”value, which is passed from a web browser or
search engine to the WordPress server. If the user agent is
“Google,” the hacked .htaccess file redirects Google to
the hacked website. This hack 1s completely invisible to
your WordPress readers, and it only affects Google rank
The following code is an example of hacked .htaccess code:

RewriteCond %{HTT-REFERER} .*google.* [OR]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http//hackedsite.com/index.php
[R=301,L]

In the above example, if Googlebot crawlss the website, the (continue reading…)