I’ll try to answer even though the questions are a bit generic: 1) Should I check anything else apart from deleting the new users and fixing the setting? When deleting a user from the admin, WordPress asks you if you want to keep or delete any associated post for that user. Independently from that, it … Read more
You probably downloaded a theme or plugin that added a “backdoor.” Otto has a good post on the subject: How to find a backdoor in a hacked WordPress
Put this in a network activated plugin. add_filter(‘pings_open’,’__return_false’); No more incoming pings.
Adjust the amount of visible comments in the Screen Options:
Those characters you quoted here are Han (used by Chinese language), as they matched by the unicode character property \p{Han}. You can perform a regular expression search in a plugin like so: <?php /** * Plugin Name: Drop comments by chars * Description: Delete comments which includes unicode characters of Han, Hangul and Cyrillic. * … Read more
Have you tried clicking Wordfence’s button, ‘Repair all Repairable Files’? It may be able to replace all the plugin and WP core files with the correct repository versions. You are right that if you back up, wipe the site, and reload the backup, you’re not accomplishing anything. That said, you need some kind of backup, … Read more
I would generally not recommend modifying files for Plugins that you do not control. Better would be to write your own site/custom Plugin, to control this hook: add_action(‘akismet_scheduled_delete’, ‘akismet_delete_old’); First, to stop the deletion altogether, simply call: remove_action(‘akismet_scheduled_delete’, ‘akismet_delete_old’); Then, you can set up a cron job (or similar), to fire the akismet_delete_old() function on … Read more
Sabre is great plugin, it allows me to block dozens of spam user registration per week. It has also many useful features to control the style and captcha’s complexity.
First of all, report whoever is doing it. You obviously could block anything with a query-string that contains screw-you, but that’ll only help in this case. Maybe Drop any requests with HTTP/1.0 (browser don’t use it, and “good” bots like google don’t either, but if you need to provide access to special tools, you might … Read more
Use these three plugins in combination: Cookies for Comments Simple Trackback Validation Akismet Ditch the captcha and math plugins, they’re pretty much useless. The combination of these three is enough for most anybody, without having to put any problems back on the user.