We often write about malware that steal payment information from sites built with Magento and other types of e-commerce CMS. When discussing credit card skimmers like Magecart, it’s sometimes overlooked that WordPress also has a decent share in the ecommerce segment. There are numerous popular plugins that can easily turn a WordPress site into a […]
Tag Archives: WordPress Security
Pharma Spam Redirects to .su & .eu Sites
We regularly clean all sorts of black hat SEO infections. During these infection cleanups, we often find compromised websites redirecting visitors to fake “Canadian Pharmacy” landing pages selling counterfeit men’s health pills from various .su and .eu top level domains. Spammy Redirect File Names & Contents These SEO infections usually come in the form of […]
Data URLs and HTML Entities in New WordPress Malware
Last week, an ongoing WordPress malware campaign started a new wave which included a variety of experimental injection types. Scripts as Data URLs The first type looks pretty similar to what we discussed in our recent post. However, instead of placing the code between the … tags, these injections have begun to embed them inline […]
Fake UpdraftPlus Plugins
We often find various fake WordPress plugins installed by hackers during website cleanups. Recently, we’ve noticed a new wave of infections that install fake plugins with backdoor functionality. Malicious Plugins Sourced from UpdraftPlus Attackers have been using different names for these fake plugins, including initiatorseo or updrat123—but any title can be used. While their code […]
Cryptominers & Backdoors Found in Fake Plugins
When cleaning websites, we regularly find phishing pages, malicious code injected into files, and SEO spam. However, over the past couple of months we’ve also noticed a considerable increase in the number of malicious plugins which have been added to compromised websites as well. These plugins appear to be legitimate, but inspecting the code reveals […]
A New Wave of Buggy WordPress Infections
We’ve been following an ongoing malware campaign for the past couple of years now. This campaign is renowned for its prompt addition of exploits for newly discovered WordPress theme and plugin vulnerabilities. Every other week, the attackers introduce new domain names and slightly change the obfuscation of their scripts to prevent detection. For example, last […]
Raising Awareness: WPBeginner Spotlight
We’re dedicated to creating the best website security guides and professional services. One way we get our message out is by partnering with open-source CMS communities, web devs, and industry professionals. Small businesses and bloggers don’t often think about website security, but our partners are doing their part to raise awareness. This includes educating audiences […]
Fake Human Verification Spam
We recently released an update to our Labs Knowledgebase for new plugins that had been targeted during the month of July 2019. One of these newly targeted plugins was Advanced Booking Calendar — and it didn’t take long before we were receiving clean up requests for websites that had already been exploited through this plugin. […]
Misuse of WordPress update_option() function Leads to Website Infections
In the past four months, Sucuri has seen an increase in the number of plugins affected by the misuse of WordPress’ update_option() function. This function is used to update a named option/value in the options database table. If developers do not implement the permission flow correctly, attackers can gain admin access or inject arbitrary data […]
Dissecting the WordPress 5.2.3 Update
Last week, WordPress released version 5.2.3 which was a security and maintenance update, and as such, contained many security fixes. Part of our day to day work is to analyse these security releases, discover what security issue it is fixing and come up with a Proof of Concept for further internal testing. Based on our […]
