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WordPress Security · Emergency Cleanup in < 24 Hours

WordPress site hacked? We'll clean it.

Malware, SEO spam, phishing redirects, backdoor admin users, cron jobs you didn't schedule. If your WordPress site is compromised, we can have it clean, hardened, and monitored within 24 hours — most often within 6. 500+ WordPress security cleanups since 2007.

< 24 hr
Avg cleanup time
500+
Sites cleaned
99%
First-attempt success
24/7
Monitoring after
WordPress security services by Aapta — a security engineer auditing encrypted traffic, rotating keys, and hardening a WordPress site behind firewall, malware shield and 2FA protection
Why WordPress gets hacked

Most compromises don't come from a zero-day - they come from something boring.

A plugin that hasn't updated in two years. An admin password that's on the top-1000 most-guessed list. A theme licence that expired and silently stopped getting security patches. A host that put your site on shared infrastructure with 400 other WordPress sites, one of which got compromised last weekend. That's where WordPress hacks actually come from.

WordPress powers 43% of the web, which makes it the most-targeted CMS on the planet. Automated bots scan for known vulnerable plugin versions, default /wp-admin login pages, and sites running outdated PHP. If your site ticks one of those boxes, it's already on the target list — you just haven't been hit yet.

We've cleaned everything from quiet SEO spam injections that took months to notice, to full-site ransomware where every post was redirecting to crypto-phishing. The work is different each time. The root cause is almost always the same: one thing on the stack wasn't patched.

01

Outdated plugins & themes

90% of WordPress compromises start here. Nulled plugins from shady sources are the worst offenders.

02

Weak admin credentials

'admin' / 'password123' still works more often than you'd think. Brute-force bots run 24/7, worldwide.

03

No WAF at the edge

Without Cloudflare, SiteLock, or a server-side WAF, every bot that wants a go gets one.

04

Shared hosting bleed

One compromised site on shared hosting can infect everyone else on the same box.

05

Old WP core or PHP

Running WordPress 5.x or PHP 7? You're exposed to vulnerabilities patched months or years ago.

What our WordPress security service covers

End-to-end security - not just a scan

Most 'security plugins' run a scan and show you a red list. We actually do the work: clean, patch, harden, monitor. Here's what's included in every engagement.

Emergency malware cleanup

Remove malicious code, phishing redirects, SEO spam, backdoor users. Restore clean copies from backup where available.

Vulnerability patching

Update WP core, plugins, themes to patched versions. Replace abandoned plugins with actively maintained alternatives.

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Cloudflare or SiteLock at the edge, plus server-level rules that block known attack patterns before they hit WordPress.

Login hardening & 2FA

Rate limiting, custom login URL, 2FA for all admin accounts, strong password enforcement, IP allowlist for staff.

File integrity monitoring

Daily scans for unexpected file changes. Any new PHP file in /wp-content/uploads is flagged and blocked immediately.

Database cleanup

Remove injected spam content, orphaned options, suspicious cron jobs, and unexpected admin users that shouldn't be there.

SSL & security headers

Proper SSL config, HSTS, CSP, X-Frame-Options, Referrer-Policy. The headers most WordPress sites never set correctly.

Ongoing monitoring

24/7 uptime and malware monitoring post-cleanup, with alerts that reach a real human — not an unread inbox.

Post-incident report

Detailed write-up: what was compromised, how it got in, what we did, and what you should change going forward.

How we clean a hacked WordPress site

From SOS call to monitoring - in under 24 hours

The process we've refined over 500+ WordPress security cleanups.

01
30 min

Initial triage & scope

Get admin access (or FTP / cPanel if admin is locked), run a fast scan, and tell you within 30 minutes how bad it is and how long the clean will take. If we can't recover, we say so up front.

02
30 min

Isolate & snapshot

Full backup of the compromised state for evidence. Then we put the site into maintenance mode to stop further damage and prevent search engines from indexing the injected content.

03
2–6 hr

Clean & patch

Remove malicious code, restore clean WordPress core and plugin files, purge injected database content, and patch the specific vulnerability the attacker used to get in.

04
1–2 hr

Harden & rescan

Install WAF, 2FA, file integrity monitor, rate limiter, security headers. Re-scan with multiple tools to verify the site is actually clean. Only then do we bring it back online.

05
30 days

Monitor & report

30-day post-cleanup monitoring included. At day 30 you either onboard to our care plan for ongoing security, or we hand off with a hardening checklist you can audit yourself.

Real project

How we cleaned a ransomware infection on a high-traffic publisher in 4 hours

Publisher · WordPress hackedChennai, India

3M monthly pageviews, crypto-phishing on every post, pharma spam in Google — back online at 4h 12m

A Chennai news publisher woke on a Monday to find every post on their WordPress site redirecting visitors to a crypto-phishing page. Visitors who didn't land on the phishing page saw Russian pharma spam in their Google search results. The site was doing 3M pageviews a month — every hour of downtime was costing them thousands in ad revenue.

When they called us, we had emergency access within 20 minutes. Within 90 minutes we'd identified the entry point (a WooCommerce addon running a 14-month-old vulnerable version), isolated the infection, and confirmed the scope: 800+ injected PHP files and around 12,000 spam database rows.

We cleaned the malicious code, restored from our backup of pre-compromise files (they'd been on our care plan for 18 months, so we had clean snapshots), patched the plugin, and hardened the stack with Cloudflare WAF, file integrity monitoring, and 2FA for all admin accounts. Site was back online at 4 hours 12 minutes, including a full post-clean QA sweep.

Stack used
Cloudflare WAFBackup restoreMalCare2FAFile integrity scanSiteLock
Results
4h 12m
Total cleanup time
0 posts
Content lost
0 drops
SEO rankings lost
WordPress security FAQ

Questions we get on the first call

Average cleanup is under 24 hours. Most sites are fully clean and back online within 6 hours. The only cases that go longer are sites with extensive custom code we haven't seen before, or where backups are missing and we're rebuilding content manually.

Standard emergency cleanup starts at ₹14,999 ($199) and covers most small-to-mid WordPress sites. Sites with heavy custom code, ecommerce, or multi-site setups are quoted on the call. If we clean it and it gets re-infected in the first 30 days from the same vector, the follow-up clean is on us.

We assume they are, until proven otherwise. Our process rotates every credential (WP, FTP, cPanel, database), invalidates all active sessions, rebuilds /wp-content from clean sources, and puts the site behind a WAF before it comes back online. If the backdoor persisted, the WAF catches the next attempt.

If Google already indexed the injected spam or phishing content, you may see a temporary dip. We request reindexing of every affected URL, submit a clean sitemap, and monitor Search Console for 'hacked content' warnings. Most sites we clean recover their rankings within 2–4 weeks.

You don't have to be on one, but we strongly recommend it. About 30% of WordPress sites that are cleaned and released without ongoing maintenance get re-compromised within 12 months. A care plan keeps plugins patched, credentials rotated, and the WAF in front — which is what actually stops the next attempt.

We can make your site materially harder to compromise — patched core, patched plugins, WAF at the edge, 2FA on admin, file integrity monitoring, and least-privilege hosting. No one can promise 'never hacked again' — but we can put you in the top 1% for WordPress security posture, which is where attackers stop trying.

Yes, and this is one of the most common calls we get. Most host 'cleanups' are a find-and-delete pass on known malware signatures. They don't patch the vulnerability, don't close the backdoor, and don't harden the stack. We do all three, which is why re-infection rates on sites we've cleaned are under 1%.

SiteLock is a CDN with a WAF — good at edge blocking, not at cleanup. Wordfence is a WordPress plugin that scans — good at detection, only OK at cleanup. We use both of them (and MalCare) as tools inside a managed service: you get human review, manual cleanup, hardening, and monitoring. The tools alone can't do the judgement-call work.

Yes. Around 40% of our WordPress security work is for clients in the US and UK. We respond in your timezone, communicate on Slack / email / WhatsApp, and bill in USD or GBP. Emergency response is 24/7 because hacks don't respect office hours.

We send you a secure credential intake link. You paste admin + FTP + cPanel credentials there, they reach us encrypted, and the link self-destructs after first read. Once we're in, we rotate every credential you shared — so even if your email was ever compromised, the attacker doesn't have working creds anymore.

WordPress hacked?

Let's have it clean before the day ends.

Most WordPress cleanups finish within 24 hours. We've done 500+ since 2007. If you can get us admin access now, we can usually have the site back online before the business day ends — clean, hardened, and monitored.