Secure Hosting WP Blog
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Vulnerable Plugin Exploited in Spam Redirect Campaign
Some weeks ago a critical unauthenticated privilege escalation vulnerability was discovered in old, unpatched versions of the wp-user-avatar plugin. It also allows for arbitrary file uploads, which is where we have been seeing the infections start. This plugin has...
Nulled WordPress Plugins – Dangers and Downsides
In our 2020 Threat Report, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence Team identified malware distributed via nulled, pirated, or counterfeit plugins and themes as one of the largest threats facing the WordPress ecosystem. Many site owners are unaware of the risks associated...
Episode 125: Critical SQL Injection Vulnerability Patched in WooCommerce
A critical SQL injection vulnerability was discovered in WooCommerce, the most popular e-Commerce plugin used by over 5 million WordPress sites. The WordPress.org team pushed a forced security update ensuring that over 90 versions of WooCommerce were patched. The...
Critical SQL Injection Vulnerability Patched in WooCommerce
Update: The article originally credited Tommy DeVoss (dawgyg) for the discovery. We’ve since been contacted by Tommy, who let us know that the credit should go to another researcher, Josh from DOS (Development Operations Security) On July 14, 2021, WooCommerce...
An Overview of Basic WordPress Hardening
We have discussed in the past how out-of-the-box security configurations tend to not be very secure. This is usually true for all software and WordPress is no exception. While there are a plethora of different ways that site owners can lock down their website, in this...
Common WordPress Vulnerabilities and Prevention Through Secure Coding Best Practices
WordPress has experienced exponential growth in the past several years and now holds over 42% of the CMS market share for all major sites. There are over 50,000 plugins available to download in the WordPress repository. That does not include the thousands of premium...
Magecart Swiper Uses Unorthodox Concatenation
MageCart is the name given to the roughly one dozen groups of cyber criminals targeting e-commerce websites with the goal of stealing credit card numbers and selling them on the black market. They remain an ever-growing threat to website owners. We’ve said many times...
Episode 124: PrintNightmare 0Day Exploit Accidentally Leaked Online
Security researchers accidentally leaked zero-day exploit code for a new Windows bug, now called PrintNightmare, while easily exploitable vulnerabilities in the ProfilePress plugin, previously called WP User Avatar, were patched quickly. An unprotected cloud database...
Online Credit Card Theft – A Brief Overview of Online Fraud and Abuse – Part 2
In my previous post about ecommerce credit card swipers I described the general overview of the online ecommerce environment as well as some of the reasons behind why websites become compromised with this type of malware. In this post I will go into some more detail...
Easily Exploitable Critical Vulnerabilities Patched in ProfilePress Plugin
On May 27, 2021, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team initiated the responsible disclosure process for several vulnerabilities that were discovered in ProfilePress, formerly WP User Avatar, a WordPress plugin installed on over 400,000 sites. These flaws made it...
Episode 123: Over 30 Million Dell Devices at Risk for Remote BIOS Attacks
Over 30 million Dell devices are at risk for remote BIOS attacks due to four separate security bugs, which can have far reaching effects for enterprise organizations heavily invested in Dell devices. VMware Carbon Black App Control has been updated this week to fix a...
Online Credit Card Theft – A Brief Overview of Online Fraud and Abuse – Part 1
Many clients that we work with host and operate ecommerce websites which are frequent targets of attackers. The goal of these attacks is to steal credit card details from unsuspecting victims and sell them on the black market for a profit. The online ecommerce...
Episode 122: Largest Password Dump in History Fuels Credential Stuffing Extravaganza
Sites running Jetpack are being infected via compromised WordPress.com credentials. The largest password dump ever with 8.4 billion passwords is used in credential stuffing attacks. Wordfence Threat Intelligence discloses new plugin vulnerabilities as well as a...
Malicious Redirects Through Bogus Plugin
Recently we have been seeing a rash of WordPress website compromises with attackers abusing the plugin upload functionality in the wp-admin dashboard to redirect visitors and website owners to malicious websites. The payload is the following bogus plugin located here:...
Service Vulnerabilities: Shared Hosting Symlink Security Issue Still Widely Exploited on Unpatched Servers
The Wordfence site cleaning team helps numerous customers recover from malware infections and site intrusions. While doing so, Wordfence Security Analysts perform a detailed forensic investigation in order to determine how the site was compromised by attackers. In a...
Cross-Site Request Forgery Patched in WP Fluent Forms
On March 2, 2021, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team responsibly disclosed a Cross-Site Request Forgery(CSRF) vulnerability in WP Fluent Forms, a WordPress plugin installed on over 80,000 sites. This vulnerability also allowed a stored Cross-Site Scripting(XSS)...
High Severity Vulnerability Patched in WooCommerce Stock Manager Plugin
On May 21, 2021, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team initiated the responsible disclosure process for a vulnerability that we discovered in WooCommerce Stock Manager, a WordPress plugin installed on over 30,000 sites. This flaw made it possible for an attacker to...
Password Attacks 101
According to the 2020 Data Breaches report by Verizon, 25% of all breaches involved the use of stolen credentials. And for small businesses, that number hit 30%. Brute force attacks have a similar share, accounting for 18% of all breaches, and 34% of those for small...
Episode 121: Wordfence is Now a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA)
Wordfence is now a CVE Numbering Authority, or a CNA. As a CNA, Wordfence can now assign CVE IDs for new vulnerabilities in WordPress Core, WordPress Plugins and WordPress Themes. An outage at Fastly takes down major websites including Reddit, Twitch, Amazon, and many...
Malicious Attack Campaign Targeting Jetpack Users Reusing Passwords
The Wordfence Threat Intelligence and Site Cleaning teams have been tracking a malware campaign that redirects all site visitors to malvertising domains, while attempting to keep site administrators unaware of the infection. Since June 1, 2021, the number of sites we...
WordPress News
WordPress 5.8 Beta 3
WordPress 5.8 Beta 3 is now available for testing! This software is still in development, so it is not recommended to run this version on a production site. Consider setting up a test site to play with it. You can test the WordPress 5.8 Beta 3 in three ways:...
WP Briefing: Episode 11: WordCamp Europe 2021 in Review
In this episode, Josepha Haden Chomphosy does a mini deep dive into WordCamp Europe 2021, specifically the conversation between the project’s co-founder, Matt Mullenweg, and Brian Krogsgard formerly of PostStatus. Tune in to hear her take and for this episode’s small...
WordPress 5.8 Beta 2
WordPress 5.8 Beta 2 is now available for testing! This software is still in development, so it’s not recommended to run this version on a production site. Consider setting up a test site to play with it. You can test the WordPress 5.8 Beta 2 in two ways:...
WordPress 5.5.1 Maintenance Release
WordPress 5.5.1 is now available! This maintenance release features 34 bug fixes, 5 enhancements, and 5 bug fixes for the block editor. These bugs affect WordPress version 5.5, so you’ll want to upgrade. You can download WordPress 5.5.1 directly, or visit...
The Month in WordPress: August 2020
August was special for WordPress lovers, as one of the most anticipated releases, WordPress 5.5, was launched. The month also saw several updates from various contributor teams, including the soft-launch of the Learn WordPress project and updates to Gutenberg. Read on...