I signed up here just to post my resolution. I don’t know exactly what part of this fixed my problem… but its fixed.
Step one: Cleared out all of my .htaccess files. make sure your file permission is set to 644. i noticed that some were changed. Many of them had redirects in them and were hidden by scrolling down and right. I made them all blank other than the one in my public_html folder. This is the code I used for the public_html .htaccess file:
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress
Step two: Changed every .htaccess file on the server from file permission 644 to file permission 444.
Step three: found files that did not look right. these included a folder named “issue.” I deleted the entire folder. inside this folder was a .php file called honey.php.
I also found a file called “wp-zycgg” in wp-content/themes. I deleted this entirely.
I also found 2 files in the home directory called component.php and counter.php. I deleted them both.
Step 4: I installed a plugin called wordfence and scanned the website.
https://www.wordfence.com/
Wordfence flagged a couple files and I removed them as well.
step 5 I then updated wordpress to the same version to restore any missing or corrupt files.
After that I scanned the site here: https://sitecheck.sucuri.net
since then I have been good. Have not had any issues since. I apologize if any of this seems confusing or useless but this is what worked for me. This was making me crazy for a coupled days.