WordPress Hack"___123___POST TITLE – SITE NAME___123___"

Question

Today I saw something weird on my blog post comment. Someone commented a blog title in the comment with site name in the following format:

___123___POST TITLE – SITE NAME___123___

I Googled with ___123___ and found that on so many website comment section there is this type of comment in the same format and all website are using WordPress CMS.

I couldn't find the reason why people are posting this type of comment randomly on any website.

Really wanted to know what this type of comment does?

Answer 1

While I agree, that you should definitely have a security plugin on your site, this is most likely a failed probing attempt rather than an actual hack.

POST TITLE – SITE NAME is likely associated with a script that was trying to automatically grab information about your post and instead revealed that it could not find that info, because it did not return your actual title/site name

The 3 underscores are used by some themes as a formatting tool to make text show up as Bold and Italic, so if this probe worked you'd see 123. In short, this only looks wierd because what they were trying to do failed, if it worked you'd see something like "123 My cool post – mySite.com 123"

Answer 2

This is not a good view to automatically add this type of text in the title. It might be someone trying to hack!

You should try a different technique to provide security for your site. You might use security plugin or update everything in your WordPress from theme to plugin.

Make sure your WordPress version is also updated with latest one. Check with security plugin if anyone tries to attempt login. If yes then plugin has the option to block IP immediately to secure your site. Remove all content which you like not appropriate and update your site with security.

These all things are required to secure your site for future purpose in terms of long period.

It might be helpful for you. Thank you.