Possible phishing on wordpress site

  • Unknown's avatar
    sourcestop · Member ·

    Hi

    Hostgator recently told me that I had exceeded CPU usage and had, therefore, blocked my site.

    I had it whitelisted today and I have been trying to figure out what has happened.

    I’ve tried talking to their customer help, but they have been pretty useless. Basically, I have no idea how to lower the CPU. I have tried to follow a few web guides but I don’t think it will have made much difference.

    I noticed a massive spike in visitors in Feb (which considering I wasn’t even using the site/posting on the site is odd) – in 2016 the entire year I used less than 4gb and in Feb alone I apparently used 12gb. The lady at Hostgator suggested it might be the result of phishing?

    She said I need a professional web developer to resolve the issue before I can ask them to put my site back live. This site is just a hobby and I can’t really pay out for an expert to figure out whatever is going on. Apparently, HostGator can’t even point me in the right direction and identify what exactly is causing the spike.

    So any help anyone can provide would be much appreciated.

    Sorry if this makes little sense, I’m a bit lost with it all at the moment.

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    Your site is using the self-hosted WordPress.org software which doesn’t work the same as WordPress.com, and it’s on Hostgator’s servers so we have no access to it to find out what might be going on.

    If you’re not able to get a professional developer to help you, you can ask in the self-hosted forums instead. Someone there might be able to point you in the right direction:

    https://wordpress.org/support/

    But in the WordPress.com version of the WordPress software we have no control over CPU usage, so I don’t even know where to start looking into this.

    The lady at Hostgator suggested it might be the result of phishing?

    I don’t think the lady at Hostgator knows what phishing is. Phishing is when someone creates a site that resembles a site you use regularly to trick you into giving away info like usernames and passwords. A phishing attack won’t randomly direct people to visit a site the phisher doesn’t even control.

  • Unknown's avatar
    jayjaygeorge · Member ·

    A popup scam keeps coming up on my blog when me or others click on some of my articles. It says “your Iphone has 6 viruses….” Please let me know how to get rid of this hack if you can. Thank you.

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    @jayjaygeorge

    Please don’t post in unrelated threads start by other users.

    What you’re describing sounds like adware running in your browser. There have been many reports of this problem in the mobile version of Safari recently, not just on WordPress.com.

    Google “iOS pop ups” and you’ll find many reports of this happening on a variety of websites, not just WordPress.com. Ads like this have been showing up on iOS since at least 2014 from what I can find, but it appears to be on the increase in the past few weeks.

    Set your device to airplane mode and force-quit Safari. Restart Safari and completely clear the browser cache and history. Then disable airplane mode. Based on the articles I could find about this issue, that should stop the pop-ups from appearing.

  • The topic ‘Possible phishing on wordpress site’ is closed to new replies.