The official PHP git repository, http://git.php.net/, was compromised this Sunday, March 28. An attacker was able to modify the PHP source code twice and inject a backdoor into it. Thankfully, both attempts were quickly detected and removed by the PHP team. Per a statement released in PHP’s internal mailing list, the current investigation believes the […]
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How Do Websites Get Hacked?
As much as the web has grown, surprisingly not a lot has changed in how websites get hacked. The most important thing you can do in keeping the web – and your own sites and visitors – safe is to understand these unchanging truths and hold them close to heart. Consider the Scale of Hacked […]
Server Side Data Exfiltration via Telegram API
One of the themes commonly highlighted on this blog includes the many creative methods and techniques attackers employ to steal data from compromised websites. Credit card skimmers, credential and password hijackers, SQL injections, and even malware on the server level can be used for data exfiltration. What’s more, attackers may be able to accomplish this […]
Magento 2 PHP Credit Card Skimmer Saves to JPG
Bad actors often leverage creative techniques to conceal malicious behaviour and harvest sensitive information from ecommerce websites. A recent investigation for a compromised Magento 2 website revealed a malicious injection that was capturing POST request data from site visitors. Located on the checkout page, it was found to encode captured data before saving it to […]
Trojan Spyware and BEC Attacks
When it comes to an organization’s security, business email compromise (BEC) attacks are a big problem. One primary reason impacts are so significant is that attacks often use a human victim to authorize a fraudulent transaction to bypass existing security controls that would normally be used to prevent fraud. Another reason is that social engineering […]
SQL Triggers in Website Backdoors
Over the past year, there’s been an increasing trend of WordPress malware using SQL triggers to hide malicious SQL queries within compromised databases. These queries inject an admin level user into the infected database whenever the trigger condition is met. What makes this especially problematic for website owners is that most malware cleanup guides focus […]
UCEPROTECT: When RBLs Go Bad
Realtime Blackhole Lists (RBLs) can be a great tool in your security arsenal. You may not know you’re using them, but all email providers and company email servers leverage these services to verify whether servers and IP addresses are sending spam or other abusive content against a known list of offenders. These services use a […]
Optimizing Performance and Behavior with WordPress and the Sucuri WAF
Aside from providing significant protection from a wide range of threats, the Sucuri WAF also acts as a CDN due to its caching capabilities and regional PoPs — often performing even better than dedicated CDNs based on recent tests. CDNs can significantly help speed up your website by storing and delivering content as close to […]
Whitespace Steganography Conceals Web Shell in PHP Malware
Last November, we wrote about how attackers are using JavaScript injections to load malicious code from legitimate CSS files. At first glance, these injections didn’t appear to contain anything except for some benign CSS rules. A more thorough analysis of the .CSS file revealed 56,964 seemingly empty lines containing combinations of invisible tab (0x09), space […]
Phishing & Malspam with Leaf PHPMailer
It’s common knowledge that attackers often use email as a delivery mechanism for their malicious activity — which can range from enticing victims to click a phishing URL or download a malicious attachment. To support these activities, attackers seek out tools that assist in the mass sending of malspam (malicious spam) emails from a compromised […]
