How to Scan Backdoors of Your Hacked WordPress Site?

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Look for a Backdoor Scanner for you?

It is a horrible thing to find out that your website is being compromised. Hackers use it to perform malicious operations or funnel the users to their website until the site is hacked. Not just that, it blacklists your domain and even your hosting company suspends it when Google finds out about your compromised site.

Obviously, it is bad enough to have your website hacked once, to have it hacked over and over is a nightmare. In this, you are not alone. About 75 percent of the hundreds and thousands of compromised WordPress pages we have analysed in the past decade have at least one vulnerability built on them. We will clarify in this article how to search the website for viruses and find backdoors.

TL;DR

You should instal our WordPress Backdoor Removal Plugin if you have backdoors and want to just clean the infection and patch the web (MalCare). It’ll scrub the site immediately and get it right up and running in no time.

Why Do Hackers Create Backdoors?

Studies suggest that plugin bugs are a significant reason why WordPress websites are compromised. Hackers secretly create a loophole which is nothing but a malicious code after obtaining access to your website. Backdoors are tiny and concealed, allowing hackers in the future an access point to the web. They even make sure that it is very hard to locate the backdoors.

Why Are Backdoors So Hard to Find?

It can be found from your WordPress files to your servers, everywhere on the website. It is built in a way that makes it difficult to understand and can easily be misunderstood as a non-malicious code. On a page, there can be more than one loophole and manually locating them is like hunting for a needle in a haystack.

On a WordPress website, how can I find malware and backdoors?

The backdoors are complicated and appear to be well concealed, as described above. Therefore, to locate these backdoors, we require very strong devices. We should try manual scanning to do it. That might save some dollars, but there’s a fair risk we’re going to lose some of them. And if we forget one, to reinfect your site, the hacker will exploit it, taking you back to square one. Besides, the hacker may have left other kinds of malware behind. Identifying and disabling the backdoors alone would not make it hack-free for your website.

There are risks of making failures on top of all this. When you understand both of these, a protection plugin can help manage the scanning and cleaning of backdoors. Now, choosing a strong WordPress protection plugin is the next step.

backdoor-malware-3The entire aim of injecting backdoors is to encourage hackers to creep undetected into your web. To cover the backdoor, they take great precautions, making it very difficult to spot or even recognise them. Hidden backdoors can only be discovered through a powerful malware scanner.

Hackers often search for websites that are insecure and that they can hack into and manipulate. If you believe that a loophole has compromised and corrupted your website, you need to patch your website immediately. To repair your site, you can use a security plugin.

3 simple functions are done by a WordPress protection plugin: screening, washing, and prevention. But in the same sense, not all plugins search, disinfect, or protect. Some do a better job than the others do. We’ll show you a strong malware scanner and cleaner in the next part, which can be used to search and clean backdoors.

Using a Backdoor Scanner

Look at how they check when you’re looking for a particularly nice backdoor scanner. Some scanners just skim though the web in pursuit of known malware or backdoors, while others go deeply in search of fresh, active, and secret malware. A deep scanner like MalCare goes beyond scanning for secret malware. The scanner analyses the code pattern and checks its actions to determine whether or not a code is malicious. This means that every decent code is not labelled as a loophole, which is something that many security plugins do. Let’s see the output of the website scanner

Install the active authentication plugin to search a compromised WordPress account. Then add the MalCare dashboard to the site. The first scan of the tool will begin, which could take a while. But once the operation is complete, if the scanner has found malware, it’ll alert you. Backdoors are a malware type.

Not only does MalCare search for backdoors, but it also discovers any other malware on the site that may be present.

malcare-scan

The next obvious step is to uninstall them until all the malware and backdoors are found.

Generally, you would need to contact the protection plugin provider to clean a compromised website and allow them access to your website through wp-admin. To be frank, this isn’t the right way to solve this dilemma. From a security standpoint, providing entry to a stranger is never a smart idea. In comparison, it takes somewhere between 24 hours and a few days for most protection plugins to delete malicious codes from your website. Cleaning your website at the earliest before Google gets a chance to blacklist your domain is in your best interest.

MalCare is your best bet if you’re trying to uninstall backdoors immediately. It includes a malware removal for WordPress that you can initiate by choosing Auto Clean. In a few minutes, without having to crack a sweat, it blocks all backdoors and malware.

malcare-clean-hacked-site

Preventing Future Backdoor Hacks

A temporary alternative is to delete the backdoor. It is easy to hack your website again, and someone will insert a loophole into your website, triggering the same problems all over again. The trick to breaking this loop is to figure out and then repair how your website is being compromised.

The hack may have triggered three things:

  • Vulnerable plugins & themes
  • Web host was hacked
  • Using weak credentials

Remove plugins & themes

You may have noted how many changes are obtained by plugins and themes. Updates help to boost performance, add new functionality and, above all, repair glitches or security problems. Particularly for those running hundreds of websites, the volume of updates can be difficult to keep up with. Whether the plugin or theme has a security bug and you have forgotten to upgrade it, it makes the site open to hackers (WordPress patches recommended for reading). Right now, update all the themes and plugins. It’s best to make a habit of refreshing the website once or twice every week in the future. And try hiring a WordPress management service if that’s a little too hard for you to tackle.

Delete it if you are using a paid theme or plugin that you secretly downloaded for free. As a general rule of thumb, stop using unauthorised apps because most are infected with viruses that can be used by hackers to gain leverage over the website.

Check with your hosting provider

Many of us agree that they are hack-proof for hosting companies. This isn’t real. The best precautions and ethical practises are taken by web hosts, but they are not hack-proof. Reading of well-known hosting services suffering a security breach is not common, however it may happen. A German hosting supplier named Hetzner was hacked twice in 2018. A famous provider, Daniel’s Hosting, endured the same fate in the same year. The bottom line is a leak at the end of the hosting company may have provided your website with hacked access. We would recommend consulting with your web host.

Use strong credentials

Kanye West made headlines for a good cause in the IT security world in 2018. He was caught on camera unlocking his mobile with the code 000000 during a meeting with the US President. With that news, the internet blew up!

Since it’s difficult to recall, most of us see complicated qualifications as a barrier. Yet lax credentials make it a piece of cake to hack your mobile (or a website in this case). You can use a distinctive username and secure passwords as a website admin. You should also enforce a strict authentication policy where a weak password cannot be used by users on your website.

In addition, you can also take a few other protection measures, such as switching the website from HTTP to HTTPS, adding a security extension, securing the login tab, etc.

Completion

We do hope that our guide has helped you out and taught you how to take preventive action. You should review our WordPress Security Guide here if you’re thinking about taking better security precautions for your WordPress account.