During our regular cleanup process we came across a reinfection case that caught our attention. This particular environment didn’t have anything special or fancy, it was an updated WordPress installation and had 3 out-of-date plugins; that’s pretty reasonable. After running through our processes and cleaning the environment we kept coming back to a reinfection; the […]
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Why Websites Get Hacked
I spend a good amount of time engaging with website owners across a broad spectrum of businesses. Interestingly enough, unless I’m talking large enterprise, there is a common question that often comes up: Why would anyone ever hack my website? Depending on who you are, the answer to this can vary. Nonetheless, it often revolves […]
Security Advisory – WP-Slimstat 3.9.5 and lower
Advisory for: WP-Slimstat Security Risk: Very high Exploitation level: Remote DREAD Score: 8/10 Vulnerability: Weak Cryptographic keys leading to SQL injections Patched Version: 3.9.6 WP-Slimstat’s users should update as soon as possible! During a routine audit for our WAF, we discovered a security bug that an attacker could, by breaking the plugin’s weak “secret” key, use to perform a SQL […]
Vulnerability Disclosures – A Note To Developers
This post is entirely for developers. Feel free to read, but approach it with that in mind. There is no such thing as bug-free code, and any code, even the most secure, can, with time, can be used for nefarious actions. We ourselves find weaknesses in our code, internally and externally, and have to work […]
Analysis of the Fancybox-For-WordPress Vulnerability
We were alerted last week of a malware outbreak affecting WordPress sites using version 3.0.2 and lower of the fancybox-for-wordpress plugin. As announced, here are some of the details explaining how attackers could use this vulnerability to inject malicious iframes on websites using this plugin. Technical details This vulnerability exploited a somewhat well-known attack vector amongst WordPress plugins: unprotected […]
The Dynamics of Passwords
How often do you think about the passwords you’re using? Not only for your website, but also for everything else you do on the internet on a daily basis? Are you re-using any of the same passwords to make it easier to remember them? We see it all too often: weak passwords used for FTP, […]
Analyzing Malicious Redirects in the IP.Board CMS
Although the majority of our posts describe WordPress and Joomla attacks (no wonder, given their market-share), there are still attacks that target smaller CMS’s and we help clean all kinds of sites. This post will be about conditional redirects in IP.Board forums (currently #27 with 0.3% of the CMS market). Conditional redirects The symptoms of […]
Zero-day in the Fancybox-for-WordPress Plugin
Our research team was alerted to a possible malware outbreak affecting many WordPress websites. All the infections had a similar malicious iframe from “203koko” injected into the website. We were also directed to a forum thread where users were sharing their concerns and describing similar issues they were experiencing. In analyzing the infected websites, we […]
Advisory – Dangerous “nonce” leak in UpdraftPlus
Advisory for: UpdraftPlus Security Risk: High Exploitation level: Remote DREAD Score: 7/10 Vulnerability: Privilege Escalation Patched Version: 1.9.51 If you’re a user of the UpdraftPlus plugin for WordPress, now is the time to update. During a routine audit of our Website Firewall (WAF), we detected a “nonce” leak vulnerability that could allow a malicious actor […]
Creative Evasion Technique Against Website Firewalls
During one of our recent in-house Capture The Flag (CTF) events, I was playing with the idea of what could be done with Non-Breaking Spaces. I really wanted to win and surely there had to be a way through the existing evasion controls. This post is going to be a bit code-heavy for most end-users, […]
