What does your WordPress site look like to hackers? Would it be tough to crack? Or does it have unlocked doors and unlatched windows just waiting for someone to try them? If you want to run a security test on your WordPress site that’ll reveal its weaknesses, get familiar with WPScan. Even though most hackers don’t have insider knowledge of your site’s weaknesses, there’s a lot […]
Tag Archives: WordPress Security
WordPress Continues to Fall Victim to Carding Attacks
Unsurprisingly, as WordPress continues to increase in popularity as an e-commerce platform, attackers continue to attempt to steal credit card information from unsuspecting clients. Currently, the WordPress plugin WooCommerce accounts for roughly a quarter of all online stores. Over recent years, attackers whose goal it is to fradulently obtain credit card information have mostly focused on e-commerce specific platforms such as Magento, PrestaShop and OpenCart (knowing […]
Server Side Data Exfiltration via Telegram API
One of the themes commonly highlighted on this blog includes the many creative methods and techniques attackers employ to steal data from compromised websites. Credit card skimmers, credential and password hijackers, SQL injections, and even malware on the server level can be used for data exfiltration. What’s more, attackers may be able to accomplish this […]
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 […]
Optimizing Performance and Behavior with WordPress and the Sucuri WAF
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 […]
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 […]
