Advisory for: Akeeba for Joomla! Security Risk: Low Exploitation level: Difficult/Remote Vulnerability: Access control bypass If you’re a user of the very popular “Akeeba Backup for Joomla!” extension (with over 8m downloads), you need to update it right away! During a routine audit for our WAF, we found a vulnerability that could allow an attacker […]
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Thoughts on WordPress Security and Vulnerabilities
As avid readers of this blog know, we’ve discovered or written about multiple vulnerabilities within the WordPress ecosystem over the last couple of weeks specifically relating to popular plugins. MailPoet and Custom Contact Forms drove the bulk of the engagement, but those using WPTouch, TimThumb and vBulletin were also made aware of vulnerabilities. If it […]
Website Malware: Mobile Redirect to BaDoink Porn App Evolving
Recently, we wrote about a malware redirection on this blog where the malware was causing compromised sites to redirect their visitors to pornographic content (specifically, the BaDoink app). You can read more about what we found by going to our previous blog post. As described in the original post, some particular files were infected (examples […]
Critical Vulnerability Disclosed on WordPress Custom Contact Forms Plugin
If you’re a using the Custom Contact Forms WordPress plugin, you need to update it right away. During a routine audit for our WAF, we found a critical vulnerability that allows an attacker to download and modify your database remotely (no authentication required). The vulnerability was disclosed to the plugin developer a few weeks ago, […]
WordPress and Drupal Core Denial Of Service Vulnerability – Moderately Critical
Both WordPress and Drupal are affected by a DoS (denial of service) vulnerability on the PHP XML parser used by their XMLRPC implementations. The issue lies in the XML entity expansion parser that can cause CPU and memory exhaustion and the site’s database to reach the maximum number of open connections. That will cause the […]
Website Security Analysis: A “simple” piece of malware
For regular readers of this blog, there is one constant that pops up over and over: malware gets more complex. When malware researchers, like myself, unlock new obfuscated code, it’s a signal to the black hats that they need to up their game. For me, figuring out their new hack attempts and then putting the […]
Yoast and Sucuri Partner to Create a Safer Web
We’re very excited to finally talk about a partnership that’s been in the works for a few months and in light of the serious nature of the Security in the WordPress ecosystem it only makes sense. It also comes at a time where we, as an organization, are reinvesting into Website Security space through extensive […]
Backups – The Forgotten Website Security Pillar
I travel a lot (a lot might actually be an understatement these days), but the travel always revolves around a couple common threads – namely website security education and awareness. In these travels, regardless of the community I am engaging with, there are always common questions like, “How important is it to proactively protect my […]
Responsible Disclosure – Sucuri Open Letter to MailPoet and Future Disclosures
Many don’t know who I am. My name is Tony Perez, I’m the CEO of Sucuri. I have the pleasure of calling this company my family and everyday I work for every person at this company. My partner is Daniel Cid. He is one of the foremost thought leaders in the website security domain, his […]
New Brute Force Attacks Exploiting XMLRPC in WordPress
Brute force attacks against WordPress have always been very common. In fact, Brute Force attacks against any CMS these days is a common occurrence, what is always interesting however are the tools employed to make it happen. You create a website, because it’s super easy these days, publish the content and within a few weeks […]

