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 […]
Tag Archives: Malware
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 […]
“Free” Symchanger Malware Tricks Users Into Installing Backdoor
In a previous post, I discussed how attackers can trick website owners into installing malware onto a website — granting the attacker the same unauthorized access as if they had exploited a vulnerability or compromised login details for the website. But did you know attackers use the same tactic against other bad actors? They do […]
Hackers Love Expired Domains
Sometimes, website owners no longer want to own a domain name and they allow it to expire without attempting to renew it. This happens all the time and is totally normal, but it’s important to remember that attackers regularly monitor domain expirations and may target certain domains that meet specific criteria. Vendor domains can be […]
Hidden SEO Spam Link Injections on WordPress Sites
Often when a website is injected with SEO spam, the owner is completely unaware of the issue until they begin to receive warnings from search engines or blacklists. This is by design — attackers intentionally try to prevent detection by arranging injected links so they are not visible to average human traffic. One of the […]
PrestaShop SuperAdmin Injector and Login Stealer
According to W3Tech’s data, PrestaShop is among the most popular CMS choices for existing ecommerce websites, so it should come as no surprise that malware has been created to specifically target these environments. We recently came across an infected PrestaShop website with malware which was automatically injecting a super admin PrestaShop user whenever the website […]
Evasive Maneuvers in Data Stealing Gateways
We have already shared examples of many kinds of malware that rely on an external gateway to receive or return data, such as different malware payloads. During a recent investigation, we came across this example of a PHP script that attackers use for many different purposes. What makes the sample interesting is that alongside this […]
Another Credit Card Stealer That Pretends to Be Sucuri
During a routine investigation, we found yet another web skimmer that pretends to be related to Sucuri. One of our Remediation Analysts, Liam Smith, found the following code injected into the database of a Magento site. The first 109 lines of the malware don’t contain any content, which could be an attempt to avoid detection […]
Code Comments Reveal SCP-173 Malware
We sometimes find malware code injections that contain strange code comments, which are normally used by programmers to annotate a section of code — for example, a short description of a feature or functionality for other developers to reference. Oftentimes, hackers aren’t interested in leaving comments describing how their injected malware works. Instead, they use […]
