Hey friend,

I would suggest that your website has been compromised and is being used to send out spam. First, you should block outbound email while you look into this. Run this:

for i in 25 587 465; do iptables -I OUTPUT -p tcp --dport $i -j DROP; done

When you’re ready to unblock later, do this:

for i in 25 587 465; do iptables -D OUTPUT -p tcp --dport $i -j DROP; done

Once you have email blocked, make sure not to panic. A compromised Wordpress site is so incredibly common that you are among friends. It happens, it’s not your fault, almost everyone who uses it has at some point placed trust in someone who let them down. That could be a plugin developer, a theme developer, or perhaps more rarely just that you never updated the base Wordpress. Something was vulnerable and was used to, most likely, upload files to your website that are being used to execute the spam.

There’s no single list of steps that I can give you to resolve it, it’s very relative. What I can do is give you great documentation that can help you to know how to repair it. Check these out:

https://www.wordfence.com/docs/how-to-clean-a-hacked-wordpress-site-using-wordfence/
https://sucuri.net/guides/how-to-clean-hacked-wordpress
https://codex.wordpress.org/FAQ_My_site_was_hacked

I think between the three of those articles, you’re going to have all of the information that you need.

Jarland

OK thanks, I will let you know how I get on, and thanks very much for all the information and links. I am currently deep scanning my site with Wordfence and will run at least 3 different plugins on it and see what happens. I have deleted all plugins that I wasnt using and also deleted a few themes that were not being used

I cant really scan via SSH for changed files as I guess this may have been long-term. I think this because I have only never had access to my mail logs or this is the first time I have had to access them.

I just cant believe that my last host didnt pick up on this

Cheers

I have fully scanned using WORDfence, GOMIS?? and sucuri and nothing has found anything, yet my mail logs are still sending out spam

OH DEAR