Vulnerability reports and responsible disclosures are essential for website security awareness and education. Automated attacks targeting known software vulnerabilities are one of the leading causes of website compromises. To help educate website owners on emerging threats to their environments, we’ve compiled a list of important security updates and vulnerability patches for the WordPress ecosystem this […]
Tag Archives: WordPress Security
Keeping Up With PHP Updates
Staying on top of critical security risks and vulnerabilities is imperative for the safety of your website. Some of the types of threats impacting our client sites include injections, broken authentication, cross site scripting, or even attackers targeting components with known vulnerabilities. In this post, we’ll be going over why outdated PHP versions can lead to […]
Critical RCE Vulnerability in Elementor WordPress Plugin
Security Risk: High Exploitation Level: Easy CVSS Score: 9.9 Vulnerability: Remote code execution (RCE) Patched Version: 3.6.3 On April 12th, an important security update was released for the Elementor plugin patching a critical remote code vulnerability which allows all authenticated users, including subscribers, to upload and execute arbitrary PHP code on a vulnerable website. This […]
The Case for 2FA by Default for WordPress
Administrator panel compromises are one of the most common attacks that everyday WordPress website admins face. We work with thousands of clients who have encountered attacks on their websites and I’ve long ago lost count of the number of times that I’ve told clients that the point of entry was their WordPress login page. Brute […]
WordPress Overtakes Magento in Credit Card Skimmers
One of the most important monitoring tools in our security platform is our Sucuri SiteCheck scanner. It’s a free tool to scan your website for known malicious content and malware injections. The usage of SiteCheck also allows us to monitor trends in the website security landscape, and one of the things that it can spot […]
WordPress Popunder Malware Redirects to Scam Sites
Over the last year we’ve seen an ongoing malware infection which redirects website visitors to scam sites. So far this year our monitoring has detected over 3,000 websites infected with this injection this year and over 17,000 in total since we first detected it in March of 2021. The reported behaviour is always the same: […]
The Mystery Admin User
One of our clients recently submitted a malware removal request with a curious problem: A mystery admin user kept getting re-created on their website. Try as they might, nothing they did would get rid of this user; it just kept coming back. A suspicious “user” that just won’t go away… It was suspiciously generic, named […]
How to Fix the specialadves WordPress Redirect Hack
Attackers are regularly exploiting vulnerable plugins to compromise WordPress websites and redirect visitors to spam and scam websites. This has been an ongoing campaign for multiple years. Payload domains are regularly swapped out and updated, but the objective remains largely the same: trick unsuspecting users into clicking on malicious links to propagate adware and push […]
Attackers Abuse Poorly Regulated Top-Level Domains in Ongoing Redirect Campaign
One of the more common infections that we see are site-wide redirects to spam and scam sites, achieved by attackers exploiting newly found vulnerabilities in popular WordPress plugins. If you’ve ever been redirected to a page that looks something like this, then you’ve fallen victim to such an attack: Once the user clicks through the […]
How do I secure WordPress Websites for Free?
Protecting Content Management Systems (CMS) installed on a hosting server is crucial in today’s ever-growing world wide web, but how to I protect my WordPress website on a tight budget? There are tons of options available on this front, but it can be overwhelming to make the right decision in website protection that fits into […]
