BabaYaga The WordPress Apocalypse!
“It has begun! It has begun! BabaYaga Targets Affiliate Marketing Websites” That was the first thing I heard, when I entered our office. Dr. Fard came running to me and was completely out of breath. No wonder, if he eats so many chocolates each and every day. I told him to calm down and to meet me in the kitchen in 5 minutes, so I can go to my office and put my jacket and suitcase down.
While I walked towards my office I almost fell over something on the floor passing my feet. When I had a look I saw McTeddy running like crazy and muttering to himself.
Joker
McTeddy, are you out of your mind? Watch your step you bearweazle!
McTeddy
Sorry sorry, got to go, it has begun! It has begun!
And he ran away, so fast, I never saw McTeddy running like that. After I left my things in my office I went to the kitchen to get some coffee and to listen to what Dr. Fard had to say.
BabaYaga Targets Affiliate Marketing Websites!
Dr. Fard
The WordPress Apocalypse is upon us! BaBaYaga is infiltrating and taking over WordPress websites worldwide on an alarming rate! Almost undetectable and behaves like nothing is happening: it sneaks, infiltrates, takes over and maintains your website! It even detects and eliminates competition Malware from your Website!
Years ago it was thought impossible, but now the cat is out of the bag and this will initiate the WordPress Apocalypse as it is almost undetectable.
The Joker
Baba what? A new Star Wars Movie?
Dr. Fard
It sounds like that, no but this is serious business, so serious that a hacker group targets WordPress websites focused on Affiliate Marketing to infiltrate and use your website to lead incoming traffic to their affiliate programs to earn money with your website!
The Joker
But that is horrible, is there nothing we can do about it? What about Anti-Virus, Anti-Malware and all those tools that are supposed to protect us against such attacks? Will the host where our WordPress site is hosted have an influence on it as well to stay protected?
Dr. Fard
According to a researcher, it is programmed to behave as a symbiosis within your WordPress website, to live with it and protect it, so all looks normal, until one day, perhaps because you are looking up your traffic, you detect redirecting links that are not a part of your affiliate marketing program, or you notice a little bit of traffic drop. These are normally all signs of an infection.
This malware is so sophisticated, that once it infects a WordPress website, it will install many Backdoors as it has its core target to keep control over your website and keep it up and running, so the hackers can make money!
Is Another Alien Invasion Responsible for The WordPress Takeover?
The Joker
Is this another alien invasion to take over the WordPress world?
Dr. Fard
No, it are not always the aliens doing the bad stuff. These are human hackers and they only have one thing in their mind: “Stealing your hard earned money!”
The Joker
So what else does this Babagaga do?
Dr. Fard
It will do for you:
- Automatic backups;
- Automatic updates;
- Cleaning your website;
- Repairing your website.
It will do all what is needed to keep your website up and running, so it will score well with Google and thus drive traffic to your website.
The Joker
But that sounds positive, it does all these things for you, would it not be better they offer this kind of help and get a percentage for the tool doing its job?
Dr. Fard
Oh absolutely, I agree, but that is not what they are after. One other issue it has, once it infected your website, it will look for ways on the host server to crawl up and infect other websites as well. That is freaky scary right?
The Joker
Oh nooo, but what can we do? Is there nothing we can do to protect ourselves?
BabaYaga Targets Affiliate Marketing Websites! Safe Hosts!
Dr. Fard
There is, choose a reliable host. The company Wealthy Affiliate on planet Earth for example has an excellent hosting service and even teaches you everything about Affiliate Marketing.
They offer you:
- Database Monitoring;
- Malware and Virus Monitoring;
- File System Monitoring;
- Hacking & Intrusion Monitoring;
- Site Performance Monitoring.
Heck they even do daily backups for you and have a 24/24 ticket support system reacting on the spot to help you out. Highly recommendable for anyone just starting out making money online as an online affiliate or want to learn in doing so. If you see what they offer for your money, it is even a no brainer for me hahaha.
Off course if you have an advanced website and you need fast hosting, there are other alternatives out there I can recommend.
The Joker
Good to know, and yes I know about the Wealthy Affiliate Program, we use their learning platform program and services ourselves. What we learn we give forward to our fans, readers and all students of the Wealthy Affiliate University on our world planet Wealthy Earth. I will publish a review soon to inform our fans and readers what is so special about them.
Can you tell us more about sophisticated hosting and which ones you recommend?
Dr. Fard
I will have to find back my documents, once I do I will write a blog about it for all our fans and readers of The Daily Wealthy Affiliate novel newspaper.
The Joker
Awesome, that will be your first post then, I am looking forward to that, it will be a honour having you writing for us Dr. Fard.
So once it infects our website, what will it do next?
Dr. Fard
It will replace your WordPress files with almost undetectable other files. The only way to protect yourselves is with a good host as I mentioned before and with a security scanner. I can advise the plugin Wordfence in this case as the best way of detection for now.
You should be afraid and warned as there are many websites infected already and it is spreading fast.
The Joker
Thank you Dr. Fard, I am sure our fans and readers will take immediate action to see if they could be infected.
So why is McTeddy in such a panic mode? I cannot remember he has a website, or has he?
McTeddy Presents His Own Website!
Dr. Fard
Well he asked me to create one for him, as he likes to have his own as well to represent himself and many of his lookalike teddy bears out there. So yes he has one now. But it is not ready yet. You know he is always quick to panic if something bad is happening.
I will go to him now and make sure he is not getting a bearattack, there is nothing to worry about for him.
The Joker
Thank you Dr. Fard and see you later. I think our readers like to check their websites now so let’s leave them be.
So my dear fans and readers, you better take action and let us know if you are or were infected and what you do to protect yourselves, in your comments below.
The Joker, Editor in Chief of The Daily Wealthy Affiliate
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This was a very interesting post to read. It is true that choosing a good host like Wealthy Affiliate is important to help prevent your website from getting viruses. I personally think Wealthy Affiliate does a very good job at keeping viruses out of the system. Thank you for sharing 🙂
Hello Celeste,
Besides of choosing a good host, there are many ways how you can harden your website. One very common mistake from WordPress beginners is not to remove the general named “admin” account and replace it with another name, to be used as admin. Hackers have easy game to hack websites, where it is known that the “admin” default account is called “admin”. So if you have not done so yet, go change it. Besides of that there are many more steps you can take to secure your website. Wealthy Affiliate has many security layers in place to protect our websites. Does this mean we are 100% safe? No, but it is giving hackers a hard job to keep on trying. Therefore the better your website is secured, the bigger the chance they go for the easier “prey”.
The Joker, Editor in Chief of The Daily Wealthy Affiliate
Very entertaining was not expecting that. Good story and humor yet at the same time informative. I can’t help but wonder what BabaYaga will do next.
In the beginning I wasn’t sure what this was about or if it was real. Once i finished the first parts of the article, I realized I like it, it kept me on my toes till the end.
Hi Terry,
Thank you, Dr. Fard said he will inform us as soon he hears more about BabaYaga. So stay tuned and just visit our newspaper for the latest trends and other happenings on our planet Wealthy Earth.
The Joker, Editor in Chief of The Daily Wealthy Affiliate
Hahahaha I will light a fire on the third full moon and cross the red wire with the green one, exactly 3.26 minutes later I shall find the golden globe to reverse the adverse affect on the outside on the cosmos, shifting the equilibrium slightly to the right leaving a straight path to the Neva Neva. Or just a left turn at WordPress Albuquerque.
Let’s get back to your article Joker!
Yep everything said in this article is true. I’m a Wealthy Affiliate user and love everything they have to offer.
Not a worry in the world about any malicious malware. WA has me covered from head to toe and with a surprisingly small price to pay.
Thank you Joker, I enjoyed another article from you again and good-luck on your business catching aliens hahaha!
Doc
Hi Doc,
Agent Moonwalker said she will spend some extra time to profile you, she believes you might be an alien.
Yes this platform is indeed a good place to start up any kind of online business, you have everything you need on one platform.
The Joker, Editor in Chief
Hi the joker,
Thanks for the informative post about this “babayaga threat”, it kinda sound like “ransonware threat” for windows PC. I didn’t know that it exists on the website CMS (WordPress) world too.
This is something that’s worth mentioning & everyone should really start to look after on their websites for this kind of threats. Therefore, picking a reliable & secure web hosting company is really the upmost priority way to go!
Yeah, Wealthy Affiliate’s hosting service is really top-notch if we were to compare it directly with other wordpress managed hosting that’s available within today’s “internet world”. I would definitely recommend anybody to pick WA hosting to safeguard all of their online assets.
WA hosting has the equivalent quality level exactly the same like Kinsta, WP Engine (at a highly competitive pricing). Those 2 companies I’ve mentioned is no-match to WA hosting in terms of “cost-saving” for hosting WordPress sites.
-ChrisC.
Hi Chris,
We thought we bring this up as many are unaware of the risks they are taking by not securing their WordPress website. Still many have no security in place at all and there are several things they can do to make it less easy to be hacked.
We know Wealthy Affiliate is a good host. However they do not offer upgrade packages yet, should you need faster services. We hope they will introduce that one day, so many will not have to look for another host, because their website needs this.
WA hosting is very competitive and that is good news, especially for startups, who need to keep those costs under control.
The Joker, Editor in Chief of The Daily Wealthy Affiliate
Excellent piece about the wealthy affiliate websites. I belong to this community and the hosting on here is by far the best I have ever had. I can sleep well at night knowing my site is safe and secure from online hackers. If you don’t have your website hosted with WA do yourself a favor and transfer your site over to Wealthy affiliate. You won’t regret it!
Hello Cory,
Great to hear you are a member as well. On our world we have not such a program, but people can visit the Wealthy Affiliate University, where you can learn all about Affiliate Marketing. We go there as well and teach about what we learned from Wealthy Affiliate on your planet Earth. And off course we write about many topics here in our novel newspaper, to teach you, our fan, as well.
So we can fully agree with you. It is absolutely worth it.
The Joker, Editor in Chief of The Daily Wealthy Affiliate
What a fun article that addresses a serious problem — and the best way to deal with it — with great humor and creativity. The title certainly grabs one’s attention, and the content keeps one reading full steam to learn why McTeddy was running away so very fast! (McTeddy has very cute friends, I might add). Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d best go check my website…
Hi Cheri,
Dr. Fard and McTeddy say hi to you. They are happy you enjoyed our conversation. If you ever get bored, just tune in and we will make your day! Stay safe!
The Joker, Editor in Chief of The Daily Wealthy Affiliate
Ahahah 😀
This was a funny explanation and I have actually learned something new. I didn’t even know that such thing exists but to be fair it makes a total sense to me. I mean, If I was the hacker I would take like 10-20% of the traffic and use it. If you have 5 websites infected like this it will do for the one whole.
Anyway this was an interesting and funny reading, but the question I have is.. Obviously it is better to prevent yourself, but what to do once you have been attacked? Just get rid of the website and load a backup and hope it is not infected as well?
Cheers,
Eugen
Hi Eugen,
According to Dr. Fard, once you got infected, the best way is effectively remove and reinstall. There are different ways of infection. Was it that new plugin you wanted to test, or is the much older plugin the culprit? Did your account got hacked?
Perhaps analyzing the files and compare them to the backup can give you a better insight if the files are clean or not. It will be interesting to see how this case will develop over time. Stay tuned.
The Joker, Editor in Chief of The Daily Wealthy Affiliate
I really enjoyed reading this story. Very entertaining! I wasn’t aware of this threat, so I appreciate the information and will be on the lookout for suspicious links. Thank you for the funny way you presented such an important news worthy topic.
Hello Suzanne,
We are glad to hear that our interview has helped you out and yes we are here to entertain you, besides of joking around we take things also serious. We believe you will learn best when you entertain yourself at the same time.
We hope you are and will stay safe, do not hesitate to contact Dr. Fard if you need further assistance.
The Joker, Editor in Chief of The Daily Wealthy Affiliate
Nice Post. I really enjoyed reading it. I was a little bit in panic at first, but later I felt better.
Hello Ayebogbon,
Glad to hear you are feeling good, we wouldn’t like to see people get panicked like our cuddle bear McTeddy, he is fine now too and playing with some of his friends. Yes he cuddles bears, probably when no one else is there so he won’t get annoyed.
The Joker, Editor in Chief of The Daily Wealthy Affiliate
Looooooooooooooooooooooool what a post, so original.
I didn’t believe your BabaYaga story at the beginning. So funny, i liked the way you showed the Wealthy Affiliate advantages. I learned something new from your post and it is very good to know that such a thing is possible.
Hello Vicky,
Thank you, thank you! Dr. Fard and McTeddy say hi to you. We are happy to hear you liked our helpful conversation. Know that this is a real thing happening in your world now. That is why we brought it up, to help you to be safe. Please check your website and let us know if you need further assistance.
The Joker, Editor in Chief of The Daily Wealthy Affiliate
There must be some extraterrestrial intelligence behind this article, there is no other explanation!
Seriously, brilliant to say the least, it perfectly fits the definition of combining business with pleasure. You must have a lot of fun Joker, but at the same time you are providing your readers with a terrific insight into safe, trustworthy making money programs.
Kudos to you, you definitely intrigued me here and now I absolutely need to read and know more!
Stay brilliant, stay Joker!
Hi Andrew,
We are continuously trying to stay aware what is going on around us. On our planet Wealthy Earth the aliens are looking for ways to get our wealth as well. As we heard about the BabaYaga case on your earth, we had to investigate making sure we will not be affected, investigations are still running.
We are having lots of fun, well how can you ever be without it with an excellent team around you. Although McTeddy likes to be serious, he can’t help himself to be funny and that makes him even trying harder with all consequences resulting out of that. Did you know he likes to eat coffee beans, my coffee beans? Agent Moonwalker saw him running around eating them. Now if that is true, I am trying to figure out. I mean a teddy bear eating coffee beans, it makes you wonder if it could be extraterrestrial.
Anyway, I am out of coffee now, so if you get a chance to get me one I would be very great-full, it is the reason I put that Green button up, have a look.
Meanwhile stay tuned for more news coming to you soon, our reporters are on their way bringing you new stories soon.
The Joker, Editor in Chief of The Daily Wealthy Affiliate
Scary!!! I spent money, time and effort to my websites and my income will just be diverted to hackers’ purse. No, I will not allow this to happen.
Thank you for this information. This will help me a lot on what to do.
Hello Florencio,
Stay safe and be careful, harden your WordPress and always take plugins that are safe in use, the best is to look them up under the official WordPress website. If you take plugins not falling under this website, you risk to get infected as it is not always said it is safe in use.
The Joker, Editor in Chief of The Daily Wealthy Affiliate
What a funny and interesting post! I found that the way you use for writing your posts is really nice and attractive while being useful and informative. Keep posting these types of articles.
I agree that Wealthy Affiliate is a very good option and that people should be part of it if they plan to create an affiliate website.
Hi Juan,
Glad to hear you liked it. Our whole newspaper is build in this way. You can follow our adventures and while you do you learn about interesting topics. We love to entertain you. You can read more about our team on our front page.
We are always looking out for you to give you the best out there. Stay tuned for more news to come.
The Joker, Editor in Chief of The Daily Wealthy Affiliate
This article is amazing! Comical and educational at the same time, you made me laugh, but also made me wonder about my own WordPress host. I will definitely ask my hosting company about what measures they have in place in regards to my security and if I am not happy, I will check out this Wealthy Affiliate program.
I heard a lot of good things about WA, but never got myself to check them out.
Thanks again for the article.
Hello Florin,
If it is funny it is less frightened oh and did I tell you that even McTeddy learns from it. He is always looking for the fun and so we teach him all along. You don’t want to give yourself a hard time to teach him boring stuff hahaha.
Wealthy Affiliate is truly an amazing platform, where you learn all about online marketing, building websites and many other business topics. You can register for free and even host a website for free to give it a try. You can find more information under our menu Affiliate News.
The Joker, Editor in Chief
I do hope McTeddy is ok!!
It is a continuous headache keeping the viruses at bay so I am happy to see there is a solution in Wealthy Affiliate and my next stop is to check them out!
Thanks for another entertaining post as always!
Hello Darren,
McTeddy is doing fine and he says paw five to you. You can sign up for free with Wealthy Affiliate and give the platform a try, during the first 7 days you can test all options and see if it is something for you. Have fun.
Glad to hear you like our story telling and seeing you back soon.
The Joker, Editor in Chief
What a good way to post – adding a bit of comedy to things – makes it more pleasurable to read. Thanks
Hi Ron,
Thank you, glad to hear you like the way our reporters work to bring you all the news from Planet Wealthy Earth. Look around, we have many similar posts teaching you in an entertaining way.
The Joker, Editor in Chief
Hey Joker,
Awesome article, you kept me engaged and entertained at the same time as providing valuable information!
I will definitely be more diligent now.
I am glad that I am with Wealthy Affiliate since I read that you are recommending them as a safe host.
Virginia
Hi Virginia,
Thank you and thanks to Dr. Fard who helped us so much in the interview I had with him. We are having good experiences with Wealthy Affiliate so it is surely a recommendation to name them.
The Joker, Editor in Chief
OMG! I have never been so scared, phew, glad to hear there is a solution to the problem. Wealthy Affiliate sounds like a life saver for websites.
My goodness, I could’t read fast enough to find out if this article will end well. thank you so much for keeping me at the edge of my sit while reading this.
Super captivating.
Hello Rose,
We are happy to hear you had a good time with us and that our teachings are helping you to improve your business. If you have any questions just drop a line. We are all here to help you out.
Thank you and seeing you around, enjoy our other posts.
The Joker, Editor in Chief
Joker, the end is nigh! However, thanks to your efforts, many will survive!
It’s amazing what hackers will try to do in order to steal other people’s money. It’s like these people don’t have any conscience whatsoever.
Thankfully, I am a member of Wealthy Affiliate and their protection is awesome. It gives great peace-of-mind to know that hosting my site with them will eliminate such problems as the one you mention.
If you ever get to visit Earth, be sure to check it out for yourself!