Login and Dashboard in 2.8.4 blank and will not load

  • I’ve searched all over but haven’t been able to find my solution. Maybe this will help my search. I have a site that I’m trying to help out with, and the person it belongs to had someone else do some “tweaks” that have led to many problems.

    It started with this tweaker trying to change the htaccess to hide the install directory, saying it was better for SEO so the site owner bought into his “help”. The site originally had static HTML pages with a WordPress install on the site, inside a “/blog” directory. I change the site over about a month ago to have WP run the static pages, keeping the /blog to maintain the already established blog permalinks. (This site has a static front page with another page to display the blog postings in the /blog url.)

    The tweaker seems to know PHP but doesn’t understand WordPress and how it operates. Once he did what made sense to what he wanted to accomplish, the site was borked. Pages wouldn’t load and the Dashboard is inaccessible, meaning none of the pages will load and only display as a blank, white page with nothing in the page source.

    So far, I’ve been able to get the static pages to load again. The blog has been restored as well, but the only way I could do this was to rename that page template to “/blogs”. There has to be a conflict here between my install directory and this page slug, but I haven’t been able to put my finger on it.

    I’ll post this now and see if anyone has any ideas or needs more info to help find a solution. Will try to post the htaccess and current permalink structure later.

    Thanks for any help in advance!

    – John

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Thread Starter audihertz

    (@audihertz)

    Here’s the htaccess:

    # BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

    According to the SQL database, this is what the current permalink structure is set to:

    /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/

    Hope that helps.

    – John

    Hi,

    1) Either rename the Plugins directory from FTP or deactivate all Plugins from database.

    2) If option 1 fails then rename theme folder in wp-content/themes via FTP to cause WordPress Default theme to be place into service.

    Thanks,

    Shane G.

    Thread Starter audihertz

    (@audihertz)

    Sadly, neither of those worked.

    Any ideas on what I might try next?

    Thread Starter audihertz

    (@audihertz)

    Posting an update…

    After pounding my head over this, I’ve found evidence of the site getting hacked.

    Inside an upload directory from last month (which was the last time the user had uploaded anything to WordPress while using a version prior to 2.8.4), I found an interesting PHP file. It was an obvious, faked Facebook login page that warned a user that a ping.fm link they clicked on was taking them away from Facebook. Obviously this was a mining scheme to harvest people’s Facebook logins.

    So now what I’m thinking is after doing an upgrade in the madness the stemmed from the announcements from Automattic, it would appear that the site was the victim of a hack in the SQL level as well. I can’t say if it’s related to the pre-2.8.4 vulnerability because I haven’t found evidence to say either way.

    That being said, the author of the site had only been using WordPress for about a year this November, and the size of her SQL table is just about 180MB in size. There are no plugins they have been using in that time to make it that bloated.

    I’m going to give it more insight tomorrow. Hopefully my progress might get someone some ideas on where I should look next.

    John

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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