I use Google every day. For just about everything, even for searching the various programming forums that I use instead of the forum search. It is much more powerful providing me a date, the number of responses, along with a brief recap of the conversation surrounding the search phrase.I've even used Google to find free web templates to give me a reference point for building our own templates. And when we do I've seen it over and over again - hidden code in the template. Sometimes in the form of a javascript reference that can do just about anything to links to other sites to encrypted code - a definite sign of malicious intent. Consequently, unless you know exactly what you're doing - don't wander too far outside of the free templates provided on the wordpress.org site.If you use Google to search for free templates, you're probably setting yourself up for trouble. Wordpress checks all the free templates on their site prior to uploading for the general public. The other sites are promoting their own agendas, perhaps to boost their advertising or push themselves up in the search rankings - not a bad thing if it's just a link back to their site. Something they deserve for providing you a free template.So what kind of headaches await someone who happens to use one of these templates. Well it could be fairly harmless, such as links to sites that boost their ad revenue for google ads. Or could be quite malicious such as providing a back door to take over your site. The ones to really worry about are the templates containing base64 code...or encrypted code. These can do just about anything, and if they need to encrypt the code, you know their intentions aren't honorable. You can check out what the code does by using an online decoder such as the one at opinionated geek or dynamic guru. But the best thing to do is if you find base64 code, is to find another template as it could just be the tip of the iceberg. The shocking thing is how many sites provide these templates - sites that come up on the first page of Google results and are seemingly above board. Just check out this video below.
