Playing Whack-a-Mole with Hackers & Bots

Site was crashing, life was crashing, body was crashing.

Because life was crashing, I had to move site to a cheap web host, but the site was just crashing as soon as I tried to login. Didn’t have the headspace or funds to fix.

Because body was crashing, I moved to the bush to heal body and that’s what I’ve been focused on for just under 2 years.

Last week I noticed the site had been deleted. I finally decided to try and fix it, and noticed that it had been hacked in about April.

The site is being hammered by bots, crawlers, and hackers, so I’m currently playing “whack-a-mole” and slowly and methodically trying to fix everything.

Every time I change something or attempt to load something in the backend, the site “reaches it’s limit on resources” and gives an error message for a few minutes.

Every change takes hours. So this will take a while.

Changed to a new theme and spent a week configuring it to look as close as possible to the old theme.

Updated WordPress to the latest version.

Updated all Plugins.

Deleted unimportant plugins.

Disabled some plugins temporarily to make troubleshooting more effective.

Some posts are just not worth saving as they cause too much server resources to and the site to crash almost everytime they load, so I have disabled any kind of “archive/sitemap/knowledgebase” plugins – there will be a lot of posts/pages that use these shortcodes, those will be broken and I will rectify (delete) them over time.

9-11 December 2025

Today is 11th December 2025. This site was hacked and has been functioning like dog-crap for a long time.

Most posts were deleted/corrupted and there were thousands of extra files in the backend, pointing to various lottery sites and there will zip files and all sorts of changes made to the backend.

I just fixed it a couple of days ago but now that I’m able to log back in, I’m updating everything, including the theme and backend.

I’m going to do this slowly and without stress.

For the moment, it seems like everything most of the blog posts are working (haven’t checked them all, may have problems with super-large posts and the sitemaps and contact posts are broken).

I’m about to update more things on the host-side and that could break everything (but let’s not put that out there, it’s going to work flawlessly, damnit).

This homepage – I have no idea how to use the new theme to display the knowledgebase I used to have on the homepage. I’ve spent too long tonight trying to figure it out and need to move onto the next troubleshooting step and sleep, so I’ll figure out how to fix the colours/style and how to configure the new theme another day.