It’s been two months since our disclosure of an Object Injection vulnerability affecting versions <2.3.3 of the Joomla! Hikashop extension. The vulnerability allowed an attacker to execute malicious code on a target website. How Does Object Injection Work? Object Injection occurs when raw user input is passed to an unserialize() function call. When this happens, […]
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The Art of Website Malware Removal – The Basics
When talking about defense against malicious hacks, the attack vector is a common topic for Information Security (InfoSec) professionals. The primary concern is to understand the anatomy of the attack and prevent it from happening again. However, there is a less glamorous task that must take place once an attack vector is exploited; that is […]
The Psychology Behind Why Websites Get Hacked
It’s an everyday conversation for security professionals that interact with everyday website owners. The one where we have to explain that just because everything seems fine, doesn’t mean that the best security practices shouldn’t be followed, or that being safe so far doesn’t grant future invincibility. The question, “Why should I worry?” is heard so […]
The Dangers of Hosted Scripts – Hacked jQuery Timers
Google blacklisted a client’s website claiming that malicious content was being displayed from forogozoropoto.2waky.com. A scan didn’t reveal anything suspicious. The next step was to check all third-party scripts on the website. Soon we found the offending script. It was hxxp://jquery.offput.ca/js/jquery.timers.js – a jQuery Timers plugin that was moderately popular 5-6 years ago. Right now, […]
Combat Blackhat SEO Infections with SEO Insights
Blackhat SEO spam is the plague of the internet, and the big search engines take it seriously. One of the worst spam tactics on the internet is becoming more common every day: innocent websites are hacked, and their best pages begin linking to spam. These Blackhat SEO spam tactics are fighting for expensive, high-competition keywords […]
Malicious iFrame Injector Found in Adobe Flash File (.SWF)
Finding malware in Adobe Flash files (.swf) is nothing new, but it usually affects personal computers, not servers. Typically, a hidden iFrame is used to drop a binary browser exploit with .SWF files, infecting the client machine. This time we saw the opposite, where a binary .SWF file injects an invisible iFrame. This is an […]
Most Common Attacks Affecting Today’s Websites
New web-based attack types and vectors are coming out every day, this is causing businesses, communities and individuals to take security seriously now more than they ever have in the past. This is a huge win for the World Wide Web and it’s a trend that is pushing technology further towards more robust and securely […]
Spotting Malicious Injections in Otherwise Benign Code
Being able to spot suspicious code, and then determine whether it is benign or malicious is a very important skill for a security researcher. Every day we scan through megabytes of HTML, JS and PHP. It’s quite easy to miss something bad, especially when it doesn’t visually stick out and follows patterns of a legitimate […]
Security Advisory – Medium Severity – WP eCommerce WordPress Plugin
Advisory for: WordPress WP eCommerce Plugin Security Risk: Medium (DREAD score : 6/10) Exploitation level: Easy/Remote Vulnerability: Information leak and access control bypass. Patched Version: 3.8.14.4 If you’re using the popular WP eCommerce WordPress plugin (2,900,000 downloads), you should update it right away. During a routine audit for our Website Firewall (WAF), we found a […]
Drupal Warns – Every Drupal 7 Website was Compromised Unless Patched
The Drupal team released an update to a critical SQL Injection vulnerability a few weeks ago and urged all their users to update or patch their sites as immediately. Today the the Drupal team released a strong statement via a public service announcement: You should proceed under the assumption that every Drupal 7 website was […]
