We’ve all gotten the message you never want to get. Mine came in at 11:57 in the morning: a WordPress site I help maintain had been flagged as compromised. Someone had gotten in and left themselves a way back.
Here’s the part I didn’t expect. By the time I finished reading the malicious code, I realized it had never actually worked. The attacker built a perfectly functional backdoor and then, through one tiny detail, accidentally disarmed it themselves.
Let me walk you through what happened, because the why is genuinely fun, and the lesson underneath it applies to anyone who runs a website.
Continue reading The Backdoor That Printed Itself