Saves you headaches at times like these and prevention of SEO/marketing/sales loss from the downtime is another added benefit.ħ Days Free Trial How exactly does the WP-VCD malware work? To protect against such evolved WordPress hack techniques, a small investment in a security tool goes a long long way. They gain thousands of dollars from such hacks, which means that they can spend hundreds of dollars automating these hacks to infect thousands/millions of websites at once. No proactive security on the website: Truth be told, hackers have evolved their techniques over the years.Cleaning the infection is still required and so is ensuring proactive security, more on it below. However, updating all the themes/plugins after the infection has happened doesn’t mean the infection would go away. Un-updated plugins & themes: This is one of the top causes of almost all WordPress infections.That’s why we often see this malware infects all the websites on the same server when they aren’t containerized. In the case of a shared server, this malware then propagates to infect each unprotected site hosted on that server. These nulled (pirated) themes and plugins contain malicious scripts that get deployed when you install them.Īfter setting its foot on your website through a nulled theme, it goes on to infect every other theme on your site. Pirated & nulled themes: WP-VCD malware comes pre-installed with pirated versions of a paid theme/plugin.A few entry points that we’ve identified include: At the same time, it is equally important to know what could have been the source of the infection in the first place. Once infected, removing the infection and ensuring your WordPress is watertight secure going forward is essential. Top causes for the WP-VCD virus infection: Here’s an example of a WP-VCD malware well hidden within the wp-includes directory, flagged by Astra Security’s malware scanner.

From its name, one might presume the file is a part of WordPress but on cod- analysis turns out it is malware. This is from where the name of the malware comes from. Malicious PHP code within core folders: The ‘WP-VCD’ code is added at various places within WordPress.The second one usually is a nightmare to fix, often leading to the redirection of the website to malicious domains too. Unknown Javascript code: We’ve seen unknown javascript code added to either some important WP files like functions.php, index.php, or to almost all the core WP files.In some cases, we’ve seen websites that usually take 2-3 seconds to load taking more than 30 seconds to load! Slowed down website load time: Often the load time of websites infected with this malware is affected adversely.We’ve also seen hosting companies suspending accounts citing ‘high resource utilization’ as the reason. High resource consumption: The WP-VCD malware is known to consume your server resources.New admin users added to WordPress: We’ve seen hackers add themselves as a user in WordPress with administrator privileges.How to fix & remove the WP-VCD WordPress malware? Symptoms of the WP-VCD malware:

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