Last week I was asked to look into an on-premise WordPress website with a very low performance. I’m not expert in WordPress but I could say that comparing to the structure of the website and contents, it was too slow. Examining the system logs, I understood that memory usage reaches to its limit very soon as a result of huge consumption of Apache processes; in fact eventually Apache was returning white screen (500 error) to the visitors.  So, definitely something was wrong and simple troubleshooting guides mentioning to disable plugin and themes and even overwriting wordpress files didn’t help me! Clueless!

But when I was backing up the wordpress database to move it to a fresh Linux machine, something came to my attention: the dumped file was too big for their contents. Also, as soon as I imported the db into new mySql, the website became slow and eventually went down! So, it turned out that the issue is in the WordPress database. Using ‘phpmyadmin’ I found the largest table which was ‘wp_options’! I ran a simple query on it to see what’s in it? browsing through the results, soon I saw some irrelevant stuff. OMG! WordPress database was hacked and some HTML pages were inserted into ‘wp_options’ table! No wonder that website was slow! the ‘option_name’ of this table was filled with stuff like ‘/?tid=michael-kors-sac-CclA21.html’ and the value was a complete HTML file! Around 35000 of these rows were inserted and made a huge database.

So, I started cleaning database and getting more information about hacking WordPress. By the way, I put the clean database in a fresh installation of WordPress in a new machine and asked them to follow the best practices for securing WordPress website. I didn’t find similar situation on Internet, so I though it worths sharing, although I’m not a WordPress expert!