Mysterious Truncated WP Files

Early today, I noticed that one of my sites that gets 600-1000 hits a day had barely gotten to 20.  I didn’t think too much of it as most of the traffic is from search engines (read: The Great Googely-Moogely.) and the site has been de-indexed before.  It happens.

However, tonight, I tried to go to the site to check a few things and all I got was a nice WP PHP error.  If you run WP, you know exactly what I’m talking about.  So, being the amateur coder that I am, I did a quick FTP download of the file that was spitting out the error and went a looking.

I’m not entirely sure how this happened, but the file had been truncated.  The file, in this case, was the wp-load.php file.  Normally, it has about 50 lines.  The copy that I downloaded from my site had only 48.  The last couple of lines weren’t there.  I know they were there yesterday, because the site got about 600 hits.  But, all of a sudden, they just up and disappeared in the middle of the night.

I’m hoping it isn’t some perverted way of hacking the site, but I didn’t see anything funny once I got the site back up.  Which I did by just re-uploading all of the files except the wp-config.php file back into the index directory.

Has anyone experienced this?  It’s quite strange.  How about a good explanation of what might have happened?  I’m scratching my head here.

About Shane Ede

Shane Ede is an IT guy by day and a Entrepreneurial Blogger by night. You can follow him here on Thatedeguy or over on Twitter and Google+.