The spam botnets are having a field day- we’ve heard from three hacked clients in the last week alone! One site had over a gigabyte of corrupted files in it’s database; slowing the site to a crawl so even the simplest plugins timed out.
According to Softpedia, this bot, called Torte, is one of the largest in recent years. The majority of the infected machines were reached through WordPress sites with poor configurations and outdated security measures; the JetPack plugin was particularly vulnerable. Once infected the sites are used send out spam are target other machines, causing the botnet to grow exponentially.
Keeping your sites WordPress installation and plugins up to date will help prevent spam botnet infections. How recently was your site updated? If you need updates or suspect that your site has been hacked, contact us for special one-time pricing.