@cazort Yeah, I’m very sorry about that.

Tea Trade suffered a malware attack on Saturday, which was remediated and then unfortunately was re-infected on Tuesday through a vector that I thought I had already closed. It’s been a long week of clean and repair for me. During the process, I inadvertently deleted a very important file directory and have been working to recreate it since (why there was no backup is a long story). In the process, a lot of functionality on Tea Trade has been removed (now I think for the better, because it is all faster now and much of it was unused features anyhow) but also a lot of themes. The repair process takes time and while I worked with an information security contractor, who I pay for the job, for the malware cleanup, the functional repairs are all me and only me.

I keep Tea Trade online out of love for it, since it was my learning playground for WordPress development. I make no money from it (though I do make money from the things I learn from working on it), and I pay a rather significant sum each month for the server (which is, by no means a small server). The downside of it is that since it is just one person working on it, things take a little bit longer to get fixed when they break and I do it when I have time outside of my 50-hour week day job and professional consulting I do on the side. It also is lower on my priority list behind other websites I’ve created and manage.

Anyhow, I fixed the problem with your site, and I’m sorry about the inconvenience about it. The theme that was assigned to it had some files that were missing some code after the cleanup script passed through it. I saw that it was an older default WordPress theme, and it has now been replaced with the current default WordPress theme. I’m looking to get more themes re-installed to choose from, so feel free to browse WordPress.org’s available themes and let me know if there is one you like and I’ll install it for you.

Same problem with me. Figured it was a theme-problem, went to change themes in hopes that it would fix it, ended up breaking it more. Just a php error now. Should have read the forums before-hand.

Sorry to hear about the attack. It’s a lot of labour and love you put into this site.

I really wish I knew how to fix that @supermoon10 – Pete worked on Alex’s after he got home from work last night but he didn’t have time to explain what he did. He’ll look at yours as soon as he can but I know it won’t be until this evening.
@cazort – the best way to be in touch is on here, or email as Pete never looks at twitter. I do but when I do it means more time delay as I still have to pass on the message to him.

@supermoon10 – your site is fixed. I repaired your theme and you should have no trouble accessing the dashboard now. Keep in mind that as part of this, all the images uploaded have been lost. I have enabled a tool to make it easier to replace images. The details of the tool I installed can be read about here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/enable-media-replace/

@cazort – I’m pretty happy with my server and hosting company. While I pay a lot of money, I do have a rather powerful VPS with a lot of space and power. I think one of the issues I have is that I do a lot of development, both for clients and for practice. Some of those WordPress installations went untended. It wasn’t recent, but at one point I had 15 different installations, some that were spun up in a few minutes and then forgotten. In the recent case, I found that was 5 releases old that was never updated. I suspect that was the vulnerability. I don’t do that way any more. These days I do a lot testing in Multisite (which is what Tea Trade is, infinite number of websites inside 1 installation of WordPress), or I go out to an on-demand service that lets me spin up a new WordPress install in less than a minute that I can turn off and on as I need for development. I suppose the only real issue is that I don’t keep my installations properly compartmentalized on my server and generally use just one directory (and into its subdirectories for many different websites)

Aside from Tea Trade,I have a lot of client work going on on my server. This is useful because it lets me work online, where they can see it, instead on fighting with web development on my PC. Those sites are generally not the vulnerabilities though. They are kept up to date because they are tied into a monitoring script that ensures I never go more than 2 hours with outdated software.

All in all, things are good. This malware attack really wasn’t that big of an issue. The issue was a mistake I made in the repair process.

@peter @jackie Thank you!

Aaah, two updates. One: I can’t seem to read any posts on my site. I checked on the dashboard, and they’re still there and editable, but get “not found” when I try to click on them in my public site. Also: I keep getting “cheatin’ uh?” every time I try to click on any admin tools, like editing my layout, or previewing themes.

First issue is sorted @supermoon10 – it is a quick fix: Dashboard: Settings – Permalinks – (Click) Save. That’s it. I don’t know why but it fixes it immediately.
Second issue is something @peter is going to need to fix in the database.

@supermoon10 that second issue is fixed now too.

@jackie @peter Thank you both!