For the last few days, we have noticed an increasing number of websites infected without any outdated plugin or known vulnerability. In most cases it was a porn spam infection. Our research team started to dig into the issue and found that the common denominator across these WordPress sites was the plugin WP Mobile Detector that… […]
Tag Archives: WordPress Security
Security Advisory: Stored XSS in Jetpack
During regular research audits for our Sucuri Firewall (Cloud-based WAF), we discovered a stored XSS vulnerability affecting the WordPress Jetpack plugin, currently installed on more than a million WordPress sites. The vulnerability can be easily exploited via wp-comments and we recommend everyone to update asap, if you have not done so yet. Vulnerability Disclosure Timeline:… […]
Nulled WordPress Themes: Malvertising and Black Hat SEO
If you have been following our blog for some time, you know that we regularly warn about risks associated with the use of third-party software on your site. A benign plugin may sneakingly inject ads into your site which cause malvertising problems for the site visitors (e.g. SweetCaptcha). Other plugins may be hijacked by hackers or… […]
WordPress Redirect Hack via Test0.com/Default7.com
We’ve been working on a few WordPress sites with the same infection that randomly redirects visitors to malicious sites via the default7 .com / test0 .com / test246 .com domains. In this post, we’ll provide you with a review of this attack, investigated by our malware analyst, John Castro. Header.php Injection In all cases, theRead […]
Security Advisory: Stored XSS in bbPress
Exploitation Level: Easy/Remote DREAD Score: 6/10 Vulnerability: Stored XSS Patched Version: bbPress 2.5.9 During regular research audits of our Sucuri Firewall, we discovered a Stored XSS vulnerability affecting the bbPress plugin for WordPress which is currently installed on 300,000 live websites – one of them being the popular wordpress.org support forum. Vulnerability Disclosure Timeline: AprilRead […]
Ask Sucuri: Differentiate Between Security Firewalls
Question: How should a website owner differentiate between Firewalls? What do they do? The term “firewall” is not new. It is common terminology in the world of technology and security, and possibly common enough that even non-technical people have a basic understanding of what a firewall is. Its meaning actually extends beyond security. The brick walls thatRead […]
When a WordPress Plugin Goes Bad
Last summer we shared a story about the SweetCaptcha WordPress plugin injecting ads and causing malvertising problems for websites that leveraged the plugin. When this plugin was removed from the official WordPress Plugin directory, the authors revived another WordPress account with a long abandoned plugin and uploaded SweetCaptcha as a “new version” of that plugin. InRead […]
Behind the Malware – Botnet Analysis
While analyzing our website firewall logs we discovered an old vulnerability in the RevSlider plugin being retargeted. RevSlider, the plugin whose vulnerability led to massive website compromises in 2015, was being leveraged again in an attempt to infect websites over a year since its initial disclosure. The original hack required sending an AJAX request containing the action revslider_ajax_action toRead […]
WordPress Sites Leveraged in Layer 7 DDoS Campaigns
We first disclosed that the WordPress pingback method was being misused to perform massive layer 7 Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks back on March 2014. The problem, as previously described,was that any WordPress website with the pingback feature enabled (which is on by default) could be used to attack the availability of other websites. The attacks wouldRead […]
Seo-moz.com SEO Spam Campaign
Here at Sucuri we handle countless cases of SEO spam. This malware involves a website being compromised in order to spread (mostly pharmaceutical) advertisements by linking visitors to unwanted websites and stuffing spam keywords into the site. These links and keywords help the spam websites to rank higher in search engines like Google, sending evenRead […]
