Some weeks ago a critical unauthenticated privilege escalation vulnerability was discovered in old, unpatched versions of the wp-user-avatar plugin. It also allows for arbitrary file uploads, which is where we have been seeing the infections start. This plugin has over 400,000 installations so we have seen a sustained campaign to infect sites with this plugin […]
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An Overview of Basic WordPress Hardening
We have discussed in the past how out-of-the-box security configurations tend to not be very secure. This is usually true for all software and WordPress is no exception. While there are a plethora of different ways that site owners can lock down their website, in this post we are going to review the most basic […]
Magecart Swiper Uses Unorthodox Concatenation
MageCart is the name given to the roughly one dozen groups of cyber criminals targeting e-commerce websites with the goal of stealing credit card numbers and selling them on the black market. They remain an ever-growing threat to website owners. We’ve said many times on this blog that the attackers are constantly using new techniques […]
Online Credit Card Theft – A Brief Overview of Online Fraud and Abuse – Part 2
In my previous post about ecommerce credit card swipers I described the general overview of the online ecommerce environment as well as some of the reasons behind why websites become compromised with this type of malware. In this post I will go into some more detail of the taxonomy of web-based credit card swipers, review […]
Online Credit Card Theft – A Brief Overview of Online Fraud and Abuse – Part 1
Many clients that we work with host and operate ecommerce websites which are frequent targets of attackers. The goal of these attacks is to steal credit card details from unsuspecting victims and sell them on the black market for a profit. The online ecommerce environment is diverse, constituting many different content management system (CMS) platforms […]
Malicious Redirects Through Bogus Plugin
Recently we have been seeing a rash of WordPress website compromises with attackers abusing the plugin upload functionality in the wp-admin dashboard to redirect visitors and website owners to malicious websites. The payload is the following bogus plugin located here: ./wp-content/plugins/plugs/plugs.php At first glance these appear to be very unorthodox domains: hxxp://xn--o1aofd[.]xn--p1ai hxxp://xn--80ady8a[.]xn--p1ai hxxp://xn--80adzf[.]xn--p1ai hxxp://xn--g1aey4a[.]xn--p1ai […]
Password Attacks 101
According to the 2020 Data Breaches report by Verizon, 25% of all breaches involved the use of stolen credentials. And for small businesses, that number hit 30%. Brute force attacks have a similar share, accounting for 18% of all breaches, and 34% of those for small businesses. Why are password attacks like brute forcing so […]
WordPress Redirect Hack via Test0.com/Default7.com
Malicious redirect is a type of hack where website visitors are automatically redirected to some third-party website: usually it’s some malicious resource, scam site or a commercial site that buys traffic from cyber criminals (e.g. counterfeit drugs or replica merchandise). Types of Malicious Redirects There are two major types of malicious redirects: server-side redirects and […]
WooCommerce Credit Card Skimmer Hides in Plain Sight
Recently, a client’s customers were receiving a warning from their anti-virus software when they navigated to the checkout page of the client’s ecommerce website. Antivirus software such as Kaspersky and ESET would issue a warning but only once a product had been added to the cart and a customer was about to enter their payment […]
WooCommerce Credit Card Swiper Hides in Plain Sight
Recently, a client’s customers were receiving a warning from their anti-virus software when they navigated to the checkout page of the client’s ecommerce website. Antivirus software such as Kaspersky and ESET would issue a warning but only once a product had been added to the cart and a customer was about to enter their payment […]
