I swear I’m not trying to defame UpdraftPlus. Based on the great reviews, I feel what happened to me was a fluke.
A couple months back, I installed UpdraftPlus (free version) on my WordPress.org site (I used https://wordpress.org/plugins/updraftplus/ to download). To my horror, immediately afterwards we started getting popup alerts that would redirect to spam sites when you clicked ‘Ok’.
I uninstalled UpdraftPlus but the problem persisted. Google yielded a link to someone with a similar problem – a reply told me where to find any extra files which may have been leftover after the uninstall. Sure enough, in that location I found some UpdraftPlus German language files remaining. As soon as I deleted these, the popups disappeared.
There is still one Updraft file remaining, but I didn’t have permission to delete it (I have to contact my host I believe).
Now I’m in need of a WP backup, but I’m too scared to install another plugin. I’d really like to use UpdraftPlus because it’s highly reviewed (and free), but I don’t want to go through possible malware issues again and am scared to pull the trigger on a re-download.
Has anyone ever encountered this? Any ideas as to what could have happened and what I can do in the future to stay safe? Our WordPress, as well as most of our plugins, need to be updated for security, performance, etc. But it’s best practice to have backups before you update, so I feel I’m in a catch 22.