He traced the infection back to its source. It wasn't hard to find. Tucked inside the folder of his "free" caching plugin was a file named class-wp-rocket-license.php . To the untrained eye, it looked like part of the activation system. But when Alex opened it, he found a base64 encoded string that executed a remote backdoor.

The next morning, Alex woke up to three email notifications from his contact form. Potential clients were actually looking at his work. One of them, a local boutique owner named Sarah, wanted a full website redesign. The paycheck she offered would cover his rent for two months.

He frantically logged into his own portfolio site. It was worse. His home page was replaced by a solid black screen with a glowing green skull and a message: Hacked by DarkNetCrew. Pay 0.1 Bitcoin to recover your files.

Alex felt the cold sweat breaking across his neck. He opened his FTP client to look at the core files. Scattered throughout his pristine code were thousands of lines of malicious PHP scripts.

As he watched the official, clean zip file download to his computer, Alex realized he had learned the most valuable lesson of his career. In the world of web development, "free" was sometimes the most expensive price you could possibly pay.

"Alex, what did you do to my website?" she demanded, her voice shaking. "It’s gone. It’s selling Canadian pharmacy pills and redirecting people to adult dating sites!"