Too many rows on wordpress wp_options table

[Anonymous]

On one of my sites I saw that in wp_options table there are more than a hundred thousand rows
after a while they all start similar to something like:
_wp_session_
_wp_session_expires_
and it mosty sas things like “you must anable payment gateways to use digital downloads” etc….

it looks like someone inserted this bad content into my database.

Question 1) Is it ok if I just delete these rows or it will harm something?
Question 2) How can I prevent someone inserting things into my database again? and my password was strong anyway
Question 3) what were they doing with my database? I didnt notice anything visible on my site

my most importnat question at this point is question 1

 

[Anonymous]

1) Can't tell without anything to go by, are you sure that it's not just normal input from your users?

2) Keep your site software up to date and look at logs for funny activity and funny users. Your password isn't the only one used to access your site to put things into the database, your users also do this. What do you call a strong password? Do you only use that password for the site that you are talking about?

3) If you have been hacked, then they will possibly be trying to put spam links on your site, getting email addresses or getting user passwords amongst other things.

A wp forum might be of more help to you, do you have a backup before all the funny business started? Can you just start again? What version of wp are you running? What plugins are you using and are they official wp plugins?