What to do when you got hacked? Here you can find some advices, tricks and tips on what you can do!
Baba Yaga is an entity that haunts the dreams of children and a common threat that parents use when their children misbehave in Slavic countries across Eastern Europe.
But in the world of malware, BabaYaga is a form of malware that can update itself, use antivirus functionality and more. Much like the mythical creature, BabaYaga malware has the potential to haunt Joomla/WordPress or, in fact any PHP site administrators and IT support staff.
You have done a great job by cleaning your recently hacked file? Excellent, but you not finished yet!
If you were blacklisted by Google, McAfee, Yandex (or any other web spam authorities), your site is showing various malware warnings to your visitors, wich can be a big turn down factor. Luckily you can request a review after the hack has been fixed.
Be sure your site is clean before requesting a review!
By comparing infected files with known good files (from official sources or reliably clean backups) you can identify and remove malicious changes.
To manually remove a malware infection from your Joomla! files:
Log into your server via SFTP or SSH.
Create a backup of the site files before making changes.
Search your files for reference to malicious domains or payloads you noted.
Identify recently changed files and confirm whether they are legitimate.
Review files flagged by the diff command during the core file integrity check.
Restore or compare suspicious files with clean backups or official sources.
Remove any suspicious or unfamiliar code from your custom files.
Test to verify the site is still operational after changes.
If you can't find the malicious content, try searching the web for malicious content, payloads, and domain names that you found in the first step. Chances are that someone else has already figured out how those domain names are involved in the hack you are attempting to clean.
Diff tools to compare suspicious files with known-good copies:
You simply can’t be 100% safe from getting your website hacked. But fortunately there are ways to help reduce the chances of being hacked and recover quickly if some clever hacker still succeeds.
If files have been modified on your server, or files have been uploaded for instance, you can check the timestamps on those files to find out when the attacker was on your site. This is typical in the case of sites being defaced or malicious code being injected somewhere. Most of the time, the attacker will have gained access to your site shortly before modifying or uploading files to it.
