Long String of Characters found in Theme from Agency

Question about what kind of string this is

[mhansen]

Hi All - Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide.

A client recently had another agency develop a WP theme for them. After it was done, I have been cleaning up code, fixing issues, etc, that they were not responsible for. In my endeavors to that end, I found a very long string of jibberish text placed in the footer, where the social media icons appear on the site itself. (4 icons, with simple link to social media accounts)

Help me understand what this is?

A small part of the text string: (This is less than 1/4 of the whole string)

(Removed for privacy, since answer was found)

Thanks in advance,
M

[edited by: mhansen at 7:53 pm (utc) on Mar 12, 2019]

[NickMNS]

Looks like a base64 encoded string. Google a base64 encoding converter and see what it returns.

Where exactly did you find this? Just a orphaned text within the html or was it inside a tag?

[mhansen]

Thanks for the quick reply - They used a non-standard method to create a footer widget versus using the theme itself. This was embedded into a "raw html" widget, and when viewed, it appeared as it does on the website. (Showed the 4 social media icons only)

I was looking to change the link to linkedin, and found it while digging around.

Thanks again,
M

[mhansen]

Follow-up - I just hit the decoder in Google and there is nothing malicious about it. The code contains the same 4 icons, with the links to their social media profiles.

I wonder why they would use base64 to encode this, versus simply placing the links in place?

[not2easy]

Making it more difficult for average users to change the links?

[mhansen]

The designer may have also used some online tool for generating the FontAwesome icons/links, that output in Base64 versus html.

Not sure - But it's back to html.