Secure Hosting WP Blog
Security Updates are Brought to You from Wordfence and Sucuri. Two trusted security plugins for WordPress users.
Malware Dropper Takes Advantage of COVID-19 Pandemic
Since April, our team has been tracking the spread of a PHP malware dropper. It’s impacting unsuspecting victims who thought they were downloading a mapping software to monitor the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the attack is likely spread through a variety of...
Reflected XSS in PageLayer Plugin Affects Over 200,000 WordPress Sites
On November 4, 2020, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team found two reflected Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in PageLayer, a WordPress plugin installed on over 200,000 sites. These vulnerabilities could lead to an attacker executing malicious Javascript...
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');...

WordPress 5.6 Introduces a New Risk to Your Site: What to Do
WordPress 5.6, the final major release planned for 2020, comes out today, on December 8, 2020. It includes a few major features and updates, as well as a huge number of minor enhancements and bug fixes. A few changes have immediate implications for security and...
Obfuscation Techniques in MARIJUANA Shell “Bypass”
Attackers are always trying to come up with new ways to evade detection from the wide range of security controls available for web applications. This also extends to malware like PHP shells, which are typically left on compromised websites as a backdoor to maintain...
Episode 97: The Future of WordPress with PHP 8 and WordPress 5.6
With WordPress 5.6’s imminent release and the recent release of PHP 8, we talk about the rapid changes affecting the future of WordPress with new security features and new functionality available to both WordPress users and developers. We also review a recent...
“Free” Symchanger Malware Tricks Users Into Installing Backdoor
In a previous post, I discussed how attackers can trick website owners into installing malware onto a website — granting the attacker the same unauthorized access as if they had exploited a vulnerability or compromised login details for the website. But did you know...
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...
Hidden SEO Spam Link Injections on WordPress Sites
Often when a website is injected with SEO spam, the owner is completely unaware of the issue until they begin to receive warnings from search engines or blacklists. This is by design — attackers intentionally try to prevent detection by arranging injected links so...
PHP 8: What WordPress Users Need to Know
PHP 8.0 is set to be released on November 26, 2020. As the programming language powering WordPress sites, PHP’s latest version offers new features that developers will find useful and improvements that promise to greatly enhance security and performance in the long...
Episode 96: Hosting Provider Failures and Incident Response Preparedness
Two hosting providers experienced outages this week. GoDaddy had a brief outage affecting numerous systems on Tuesday, November 17. Managed.com had an extensive outage due to ransomware that affected all systems. We discuss what types of incident response preparations...
Wordfence Site Cleaning Guarantee Extended to 1 Year
Today, we’re pleased to announce that all customers of Wordfence site cleaning services receive an 1-year clean site guarantee. If your site is compromised again after our team has cleaned and secured your WordPress site, we’ll clean it again for free. Additionally,...
PrestaShop SuperAdmin Injector and Login Stealer
According to W3Tech’s data, PrestaShop is among the most popular CMS choices for existing ecommerce websites, so it should come as no surprise that malware has been created to specifically target these environments. We recently came across an infected PrestaShop...
Evasive Maneuvers in Data Stealing Gateways
We have already shared examples of many kinds of malware that rely on an external gateway to receive or return data, such as different malware payloads. During a recent investigation, we came across this example of a PHP script that attackers use for many different...
Large-Scale Attacks Target Epsilon Framework Themes
On November 17, 2020, our Threat Intelligence team noticed a large-scale wave of attacks against recently reported Function Injection vulnerabilities in themes using the Epsilon Framework, which we estimate are installed on over 150,000 sites. So far today, we have...
Episode 95: Critical Privilege Escalation Vulnerabilities Affect Over 100K WordPress Sites
Three critical privilege escalation vulnerabilities in the Ultimate Member plugin put over 100,000 sites at risk. We also talk about the Page Experience metric to be added as a ranking signal for Google search in May 2021 and what this means for WordPress sites using...
Another Credit Card Stealer That Pretends to Be Sucuri
During a routine investigation, we found yet another web skimmer that pretends to be related to Sucuri. One of our Remediation Analysts, Liam Smith, found the following code injected into the database of a Magento site. The first 109 lines of the malware don’t contain...
Code Comments Reveal SCP-173 Malware
We sometimes find malware code injections that contain strange code comments, which are normally used by programmers to annotate a section of code — for example, a short description of a feature or functionality for other developers to reference. Oftentimes, hackers...
Critical Privilege Escalation Vulnerabilities Affect 100K Sites Using Ultimate Member Plugin
On October 23, 2020, our Threat Intelligence team responsibly disclosed several vulnerabilities in Ultimate Member, a WordPress plugin installed on over 100,000 sites. These flaws made it possible for attackers to escalate their privileges to those of an administrator...
Episode 94: Hosting Provider Exposed 63 Million Customer Records
A hosting provider exposed over 63 million customer records via an open elastic search database containing verbose logs with plain-text username/password credentials for numerous WordPress, Magento and other sites. We also talk about the security updates in WordPress...
WordPress News
WordPress 5.5 Release Candidate
The first release candidate for WordPress 5.5 is now available! This is an important milestone in the community’s progress toward the final release of WordPress 5.5. “Release Candidate” means that the new version is ready for release, but with...
WordPress 5.5 Beta 4
WordPress 5.5 Beta 4 is now available! 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 the new version. You can test WordPress 5.5 Beta 4 in two ways: Try the...
WordPress 5.5 Beta 3
WordPress 5.5 Beta 3 is now available! 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 the new version. You can test WordPress 5.5 Beta 3 in two ways: Try the...
WordPress 5.5 Beta 2
WordPress 5.5 Beta 2 is now available! 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 the new version. You can test WordPress 5.5 beta 2 in two ways: Try...
WordPress 5.5 Beta 1
WordPress 5.5 Beta 1 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 the new version. You can test the WordPress 5.5 beta in...