During a recent investigation into a compromised Magento ecommerce environment, we discovered the presence of five different backdoors that would provide attackers with code execution capabilities. The techniques used by the attackers in these backdoors illustrates the ever-changing landscape of website security and highlights some of the tactics used to avoid traditional backdoor detection. Reflection […]
Tag Archives: Website Backdoor
PHP Repository Exploited by Hackers
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
