When it comes to improving the security of websites one of the biggest problems we see if the shear amount of bad information, including lots of bad advice, that is being put out there. We frequently see people suggesting using the Wordfence plugin for WordPress, which we have hard time believing somebody who is knowledgable about security would recommend due to a number of issues. Those issues include the fact that broad based security plugins like that are not all that useful against real threats, that more than a few security vulnerabilities have been found in the Wordfence plugin itself, that the developers don’t seem to have a good grasp of security, and that the plugin produces some really bad false positives. Usually you have no way of knowing if somebody giving out that advice has a different opinion in regards to those types of things or they are giving advice without really being informed about the situation. In some cases you can see that advice is being handed out uniformed, though.
As part of keeping track of security issues in WordPress plugins for our Plugin Vulnerabilities service, we monitor the wordpress.org forum for threads related to plugin vulnerabilities. In addition to helping to find some more vulnerabilities to include in our data, we run across threads about other security issues related to WordPress and WordPress plugins. In one of those we saw when the use of Wordfence being suggested as a solution, when that clearly wasn’t helpful advice.
The original poster in the thread described the problem they were having cleaning up a hacked website. After trying numerous things, including reverting to a backup copy, malicious files were continuing to be added to the website. At the end of the post they mentioned that they have three WordPress security plugins installed, but that they hadn’t been any help:
Protections plugins I’m currently using (and which can’t find anything wrong with the website)
Despite that one those plugins was Wordfence, the second and third responses suggested that Wordfence could deal with the issue:
Yes, those are not default files. WordFence is the best for scanning once you are already infected.
and
I had the same issue, so far WordFence has done a great job. Two days and no wp-checking.php has showed up. Yet!
In this type of situation what we would recommend, and did later in the thread, is to see if you can determine if the hacker still has some sort of access to the website, which is allowing them to continue to modify the website, and if that is the case, close off that access.
Incidentally, one of the other plugins they were using, AntiVirus, was one that we found was flagging a fresh install of WordPress as having virus back in 2012.
A Better Alternative to Wordfence
If you have a WordPress website that needs to be cleaned up from a hack, we provide a cleanup service performed by someone who actually understands website security generally and WordPress security (which is something which Wordfence has shown in spades they don't have).