Fake WordPress plugins appear to be trending as an effective way of establishing a foothold on compromised websites. During a recent investigation, we discovered a fake component which was masquerading as a legitimate plugin. Named SiteSpeed, it contained a lot of interesting malicious capabilities. Unwanted Advertisements The malicious plugin can be used by the attacker […]
Tag Archives: WordPress Security
Pirated WordPress Plugins Bundled with Backdoors
One widespread belief among webmasters is that attackers typically only compromise websites in a couple of ways: by exploiting vulnerabilities or stealing login credentials. Although these are certainly two of the more common attack vectors, another method is often overlooked — but the result is just as hazardous. Whenever an attacker can successfully trick a […]
How to Find & Fix WordPress Pharma Hack
It’s hard for any website owner to discover pharmaceutical spam. Finding bogus content for prescription drugs on a website you watched grow from a tiny blog can be heartbreaking. But don’t blame your website: it just got caught up in a bad crowd of SEO spammers. SEO spam occurs when bad actors inject a website […]
WordPress Malware Collects Sensitive WooCommerce Data
During a recent investigation, our team found malicious code that reveals how attackers are performing reconnaissance to identify if sites are actively using WooCommerce in a compromised hosting environment. These compromised websites are victims of the ongoing wave of exploits against vulnerable WordPress plugins. Why are WooCommerce websites being targeted? WooCommerce is a powerful WordPress […]
Duplicated Vulnerabilities in WordPress Plugins
During a recent plugin audit, we noticed a weird pattern among many plugins responsible for performing a specific task: Duplicating a page or a post. With a bit of research, we came to the following conclusion: Many of these plugins came from the same source — and contained the same vulnerabilities. SQL Injections in Vulnerable […]
Obfuscated WordPress Malware Dropper
It goes without saying that evasive maneuvering is at the top of a hacker’s priority list. Most often, they try to evade detection by obfuscating their malicious code to make it unreadable to the naked eye. In our recent post we demonstrated how the PHP function file_put_contents is used to inject malicious data into a […]
OneTone Vulnerability Leads to JavaScript Cookie Hijacking
A vulnerability in the discontinued WordPress theme OneTone has been added to an ongoing campaign that is targeting vulnerable WordPress websites and causes malicious redirects through domains like ischeck[.]xyz. This specific wave uses the XSS vulnerability to inject malicious JavaScript and redirect visitors to the attacker’s landing page. The malware also detects and leverages existing […]
Analysis of a WordPress Credit Card Swiper
While working on a recent case, I found something on a WordPress website that is not as common as on Magento environments: A credit card swiper injection. Typically this type of malware targets dedicated ecommerce platforms such as Magento and Prestashop (due to their focus in handling payment information, which we have documented extensively in […]
Throwback Threat Thursday: WordPress 4.7 WP-JSON Content Injection Vulnerability
Throwback Threat Thursday is a series of posts where we recall older vulnerabilities that have since been patched by their developers. In the past, these vulnerabilities caused significant impacts to the security of website owners. Some vulnerable sites may still be found in the wild. Back in early 2017, our research team was looking into […]
WordPress Database Brute Force and Backdoors
We regularly talk about brute force attacks on WordPress sites and explain why WordPress credentials should always be unique, complex, and hard to guess. However, the WordPress login is not the only point of entry that hackers use to break into sites. Since the WordPress CMS stores most of its settings in a database, attackers […]
