We recently found an interesting phishing kit on a compromised website that has QR code capabilities, along with the ability to control the phishing page in real time. What our investigation revealed was that attackers were leveraging PIX, a new payment method created by the Brazilian Central Bank. Features & Context for PIX PIX was […]
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Obfuscation Techniques in Ransomweb “Ransomware”
As vital assets for many business operations, websites and their hosting servers are often the target of ransomware attacks — and if they get taken offline, this can cause major issues for a business’ data, revenue, and ultimately reputation. The worst part about ransomware is that it encrypts data and removes the original encrypted copies. […]
Evaluating Cookies to Hide Backdoors
Identifying website backdoors is not always an easy task. Since a backdoors primary function is to conceal itself while providing unauthorized access, they are often developed using a variety of techniques that can make it challenging to detect. For example, an attacker can inject a single line of code containing less than 130 characters into […]
Bogus CSS Injection Leads to Stolen Credit Card Details
A client recently reported their customers were receiving antivirus warnings when trying to access and purchase products from a Magento ecommerce website. This is almost always a telltale sign that something is amiss, and so I began my investigation. Malware in Database Tables As is pretty common with Magento credit card swiper investigations, my initial […]
SEO Spam Links in Nulled Plugins
It’s not unusual to see website owners running things on a budget. Choosing a safe and reliable hosting company, buying a nice domain name, boosting posts on social media, and ranking on search engines — all this costs a lot of money. At the end of the day, some site owners may even choose to […]
The Dangers of Using Abandoned Plugins & Themes
It’s not very often that we see abandoned components being used on a website — but when we do, it’s most often because the website was exhibiting malware-like behavior and we were called to investigate and clean up the site. Old and abandoned plugins and themes are a good target for opportunistic attackers who are […]
Why You Should Monitor Your Website
In an effort to maintain unauthorized access or profit off a website’s environment long after an initial compromise, attackers commonly leverage a variety of different techniques and tactics. These techniques range from adding backdoors, stealing sensitive data, redirecting the site to other third-party resources, or even injecting specially crafted links to give their own sites […]
Malware Dropper Takes Advantage of COVID-19 Pandemic
Since April, our team has been tracking the spread of a PHP malware dropper. It’s impacting unsuspecting victims who thought they were downloading a mapping software to monitor the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the attack is likely spread through a variety of vectors, we have verified that bad actors are using other compromised […]
Fake WordPress Functions Conceal assert() Backdoor
A few weeks ago, I was manually inspecting some files on a compromised website. While checking on a specific WooCommerce file, I noticed something interesting. Among 246 other lines, this very specific part stood out to me: $config = wp_dbase_config_init(‘_as_sert’); For those readers familiar with PHP functions commonly misused by hackers, you may have already […]
Obfuscation Techniques in MARIJUANA Shell “Bypass”
Attackers are always trying to come up with new ways to evade detection from the wide range of security controls available for web applications. This also extends to malware like PHP shells, which are typically left on compromised websites as a backdoor to maintain unauthorized access. MARIJUANA is the name of a PHP shell that […]
