Alex Kovacic

Valentina Viola: a WordPress site that kept getting hacked

A Milan architect's website was hacked again and again, and the developers looking after it couldn't stop the attacks. I cleaned it, moved it to my server and updated it: it hasn't been hacked since.

The home page, with the Studio Viola logo and photos of showrooms and interiors
Client
Valentina Viola, architect
Work
WordPress security and hosting
Technology
WordPress, PHP, MariaDB, cPanel server on CloudLinux, SitePing
Online
valentinaviola.com

The problem

Valentina Viola is an architect in Milan: interior renovations, showrooms and installations for fashion houses, with a soft spot for vintage. I didn't build her WordPress site. She found me because it kept getting hacked: the developers looking after it would clean it up, and after a while the attacks started again.

What I did

I cleaned the site and moved it to one of my servers. There I updated WordPress, the theme and the plugins, and shut the doors the site doesn't need: xmlrpc.php refuses requests and the list of users can no longer be read from the API.

Since then

Since it moved to my server the site hasn't been hacked again. SitePing watches it and tells me when a file changes, when an administrator logs in or when a plugin stops getting security fixes.