Your plugin was hacked

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Rank Math and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.

It is really unfortunate that we missed adding a security check in a recent Gutenberg-related update in 2 places, despite it being added to all of the remaining 9 places already. We take full responsibility for this mishap and are incredibly apologetic about the loss of reputation that it cost your business. We have already put checks into place to ensure this never happens again.

We acted swiftly, even though it was a weekend and released an update immediately, fixing the issues, without anyone getting exploited to the best of our knowledge with your exception

The very next thing we did was to email everyone (which we don’t do for regular updates) requested them to update immediately, and made an announcement on our social media accounts as well.
The security researcher who informed about the vulnerability tweeted about our responsiveness:
https://twitter.com/ramuelgall/status/1245011512751558657

That being said, this has only acted as a wakeup call and made us even more cautious than we were and we will continue to do everything in our power to ensure that this doesn’t happen.

Also, to avoid having to update the plugin manually in the future, one can take advantage of the auto-update feature of Rank Math:
https://rankmath.com/kb/version-control/#auto-update

This will ensure you are always using the latest and most stable version of Rank Math without having to manually log in and update your plugin.

Please stay advised that the affected version was 1.0.40.2 and the latest build is 1.0.41.2, which is 3 versions higher (excluding beta releases).

That being said, what you are facing now can be resolved easily, IF Rank Math is the reason. Keep Rank Math disabled and follow these steps:
0. Take a complete backup of your site
https://wordpress.org/support/article/wordpress-backups/

1. Update all your plugins and themes to the latest version.

1.1 Optionally, opt for an auto-update by following this tutorial:
https://rankmath.com/kb/version-control/#auto-update

2. Update WordPress to the latest version and reinstall it.

3. Please enable the Rank Math plugin and if you have Rank Math’s redirection module active then re-check if all the redirections are correct here:

If not, then please delete the ones you do not recognize

3.1 Please make sure there are no unauthorized users registered on your website.
/wp-admin/users.php

3.2 Check the menu items and the links inside them and remove any unwanted links:

4. Install a malware scanner like Sucuri or WordFence and run a scan for checking if there are any suspicious files on your server. If you find any, remove them all.

5. Follow these setup tutorials to confirm if the settings are correct:
https://youtu.be/dTvZuMRzW4w
and
https://www.wpmediamastery.com/rank-math-seo/?utm_campaign=Rank+Math

6. Optional: We would recommend using Cloudflare if not already

7. If that doesn’t help, your site could be hacked due to one of the plugins listed here
https://www.webarxsecurity.com/wordpress-vulnerability-news-march-2020/

8. In that case, please ask your hosting to run a malware scanner and remove any unwanted files from the server. Change the password of all the users on your website. Change the salt keys on your website. Finally, follow these security measures:
https://mythemeshop.com/blog/wordpress-security-tips/

Again, we are sorry that this happened and we are confident that this will not happen in the future.

We are here to help. Thank you.

Hi Sylvia,

Thanks for getting in touch with us and sorry for any inconvenience or loss of revenue that this might have caused.

This issue has been an eye opener and we are rethinking our communication strategy to ensure that we better communicate security issue more effectively in future.

Please let us know if we can offer additional help in this.

Sorry again.