Change .htaccess to forbid spam links

Question

My site got hacked and a bunch of links in a spammer-created /up sub-directory are getting a lot of hits.

I have cleared out the mess (a .htaccess rewrite and a wp-stat.php file, and now I would like to ignore/forbid all requests to the /up directory.

Currently I have a simple wordpress created .htaccess, but can't find a way of trapping requests to /up before the rewrite rules take over and give a 404 page from my wordpress theme.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Answer 1

You can replace your current code by this one

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/up(/.*|$) [NC]
RewriteRule ^ - [F]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]
</IfModule>

This will forbid all /up urls