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Security Advisory: MainWP-Child WordPress Plugin

Security Risk: Critical Exploitation level: Very Easy/Remote DREAD Score: 9/10 Vulnerability: Password bypass / Privilege Escalation Patched Version:  2.0.9.2 During a routine audit of our Website Firewall (WAF), we found a critical vulnerability affecting the popular MainWP Child WordPress plugin. According to worpdress.org, it is installed on more than 90,000 WordPress sites as as remote administration […]

Deprecating the DNS ANY meta-query type

DNS, one of the oldest technologies running the Internet, keeps evolving. There is a constant stream of new developments, from DNSSEC, through DNS-over-TLS, to a plentiful supply of fresh EDNS extensions. CC BY-ND 2.0 image by Antarctica Bound New DNS Resource Records types are being added all the time. As the Internet evolves, new RR’s […]

Why A Free Obfuscator Is Not Always Free.

We all love our code but some of us love it so much that we don’t want anyone else to read or understand it. When you think about it, that’s understandable – hours and hours of hard dev work, days of testing and weeks (months?, years?) of fixing bugs and after all of this, someone […]

Malware Cleanup to Arbitrary File Upload in Gravity Forms

During our regular cleanup process we came across a reinfection case that caught our attention. This particular environment didn’t have anything special or fancy, it was an updated WordPress installation and had 3 out-of-date plugins; that’s pretty reasonable. After running through our processes and cleaning the environment we kept coming back to a reinfection; the […]

Why Websites Get Hacked

I spend a good amount of time engaging with website owners across a broad spectrum of businesses. Interestingly enough, unless I’m talking large enterprise, there is a common question that often comes up: Why would anyone ever hack my website? Depending on who you are, the answer to this can vary. Nonetheless, it often revolves […]

Enforce Web Policy with Hypertext Strict Transport Security (HSTS)

Hypertext Strict Transport Security (HSTS, RFC 6797) is a web security policy technology designed to help secure HTTPS web servers against downgrade attacks. HSTS is a powerful technology which is not yet widely adopted. CloudFlare aims to change this. Downgrade attacks (also known as SSL stripping attacks) are a serious threat to web applications. This […]

Security Advisory – WP-Slimstat 3.9.5 and lower

Advisory for: WP-Slimstat Security Risk: Very high Exploitation level: Remote DREAD Score: 8/10 Vulnerability: Weak Cryptographic keys leading to SQL injections Patched Version: 3.9.6 WP-Slimstat’s users should update as soon as possible! During a routine audit for our WAF, we discovered a security bug that an attacker could, by breaking the plugin’s weak “secret” key, use to perform a SQL […]

Universal SSL: Encryption all the way to the origin, for free

Last September, CloudFlare unveiled Universal SSL, enabling HTTPS support for all sites by default. All sites using CloudFlare now support strong cryptography from the browser to CloudFlare’s servers. One of the most popular requests for Universal SSL was to make it easier to encrypt the other half of the connection: from CloudFlare to the origin […]

TLS Session Resumption: Full-speed and Secure

At CloudFlare, making web sites faster and safer at scale is always a driving force for innovation. We introduced “Universal SSL” to dramatically increase the size of the encrypted web. In order for that to happen we knew we needed to efficiently handle large volumes of HTTPS traffic, and give end users the fastest possible […]