A forum brought back after a malware cleanup

A web agency had already removed the infection and restored the system. What was left was an outdated forum that needed upgrading and a purchased theme that needed installing on it.

The objective

The agency had a client forum that had been infected. They'd cleaned out the malware and restored the system themselves, which left the board running but on an old phpBB version, which is usually how it got infected in the first place.

They wanted the version brought up to date and the theme they'd bought put on it, so the board wasn't sitting on the same known vulnerabilities all over again.

What I did

I upgraded phpBB from the old version the board had been restored onto.

I installed and configured the purchased theme against the current template structure.

And I worked through the problems that come out of a restored install, where the file state and the database state don't always agree with each other.

The result

The board came out of the incident on a current version with the theme they'd paid for. The agency hired me twice more afterwards.