How to distinguish between a hack and an encoding error?

If you have checked your database entry of the page/article, you will see that it is a issue on Database side, or by any means there was restoring going on because of the crash, that could be an issue or a restoring plugin/script with a bug why a simple character as ‘ gets messed up.

And could you tell in how many cases the character ‘ got replaced by â€ņ?

Additionaly about the high usage etc, there could be a backdoor in the plugin etc, or someone searched for that plugins dorks and used an exploit but still you’ve would see much more HTTP activity and Web server load, you should check webserver logs of that time activity.

By finding out what was going on, only then you can rule out hacking., i will update my answer, if you will provide more details.

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