Aside from providing significant protection from a wide range of threats, the Sucuri WAF also acts as a CDN due to its caching capabilities and regional PoPs — often performing even better than dedicated CDNs based on recent tests. CDNs can significantly help speed up your website by storing and delivering content as close to […]
Tag Archives: WordPress Security
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 […]
SEO Spam Links in Nulled Plugins
It’s not unusual to see website owners running things on a budget. Choosing a safe and reliable hosting company, buying a nice domain name, boosting posts on social media, and ranking on search engines — all this costs a lot of money. At the end of the day, some site owners may even choose to […]
The Dangers of Using Abandoned Plugins & Themes
It’s not very often that we see abandoned components being used on a website — but when we do, it’s most often because the website was exhibiting malware-like behavior and we were called to investigate and clean up the site. Old and abandoned plugins and themes are a good target for opportunistic attackers who are […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Reflected XSS in WordPress v5.5.1 and Lower
WordPress released version 5.5.2 yesterday, which fixed a reflected XSS vulnerability we reported earlier this year. The root cause of this issue is a bug in the way WordPress determines a user’s current page, and which may cause a few other problems as well. Are You Affected? This vulnerability is exploitable on every WordPress site […]
R_Evil WordPress Hacktool & Malicious JavaScript Injections
We often see hackers reusing the same malware, with only a few new adjustments to obfuscate the code so that it is more difficult for scanning tools to detect. However, sometimes entirely new attack tools are created and deployed by threat actors who don’t want to rely on obfuscating existing malware. Confusing Name – R_Evil […]
