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Thousands of WordPress sites using a vulnerable version of the Popup Builder plugin have been compromised with a malware called  Balada Injector . First  documented  by Doctor Web in January 2023, the campaign takes place in a series of periodic attack waves, weaponizing security flaws in WordPress plugins to inject backdoor designed to redirect visitors of infected sites to bogus tech support pages, fraudulent lottery wins, and push notification scams. Subsequent  findings  unearthed by Sucuri have revealed the  massive scale of the operation , which is said to have been active since 2017 and infiltrated no less than 1 million sites since then. The GoDaddy-owned website security company, which  detected  the latest Balada Injector activity on December 13, 2023, said it identified the injections on  over 7,100 sites . These attacks take advantage of a high-severity flaw in Popup Builder ( CVE-2023-6000 , CVSS score: 8.8) – a plugin with  more than 200,000 active installs  – that

Web hosting services provider GoDaddy on Friday disclosed a multi-year security breach that enabled unknown threat actors to install malware and siphon source code related to some of its services. The company attributed the campaign to a "sophisticated and organized group targeting hosting services." GoDaddy said in December 2022, it received an unspecified number of customer complaints about their websites getting sporadically redirected to malicious sites, which it later found was due to the unauthorized third party gaining access to servers hosted in its  cPanel environment . The threat actor "installed malware causing the intermittent redirection of customer websites," the company  said . The ultimate objective of the intrusions, GoDaddy said, is to "infect websites and servers with malware for phishing campaigns, malware distribution, and other malicious activities." In a related 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

The threat actors behind the black hat redirect malware campaign have scaled up their campaign to use more than 70 bogus domains mimicking URL shorteners and infect over 10,800 websites. "The main objective is still ad fraud by artificially increasing traffic to pages which contain the AdSense ID which contain Google ads for revenue generation," Sucuri researcher Ben Martin  said  in a report published last week. Details of the malicious activity were  first exposed  by the GoDaddy-owned company in November 2022. The campaign, which is said to have been active since September last year, is orchestrated to redirect visitors to compromised WordPress sites to fake Q&A portals. The goal, it appears, is to increase the authority of spammy sites in search engine results. "It's possible that these bad actors are simply trying to convince Google that real people from different IPs using different browsers are clicking on their search results," Sucuri noted at

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a massive campaign that's responsible for injecting malicious JavaScript code into compromised WordPress websites that redirects visitors to scam pages and other malicious websites to generate illegitimate traffic. "The websites all shared a common issue — malicious JavaScript had been injected within their website's files and the database, including legitimate core WordPress files," Krasimir Konov, a malware analyst at Sucuri,  said  in a report published Wednesday. This involved infecting files such as jquery.min.js and jquery-migrate.min.js with obfuscated JavaScript that's activated on every page load, allowing the attacker to redirect the website visitors to a destination of their choice. The GoDaddy-owned website security company said that the domains at the end of the redirect chain could be used to load advertisements, phishing pages, malware, or even trigger another set of redirects. In some instances, unsus

Web hosting giant GoDaddy on Monday disclosed a data breach that resulted in the unauthorized access of data belonging to a total of 1.2 million active and inactive customers, making it the  third   security incident  to come to light since 2018. In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the world's largest domain registrar  said  that a malicious third-party managed to gain access to its  Managed WordPress  hosting environment on September 6 with the help of a compromised password, using it to obtain sensitive information pertaining to its customers. It's not immediately clear if the compromised password was secured with two-factor authentication. The Arizona-based company  claims  over 20 million customers, with more than 82 million domain names registered using its services. GoDaddy revealed it discovered the break-in on November 17. An investigation into the incident is ongoing and the company said it's "contacting all impacted custo

Besides Timehop , another data breach was discovered last week that affects users of one of the largest web hosting companies in Germany, DomainFactory, owned by GoDaddy. The breach initially happened back in last January this year and just emerged last Tuesday when an unknown attacker himself posted a breach note on the DomainFactory support forum. It turns out that the attacker breached company servers to obtain the data of one of its customers who apparently owes him a seven-figure amount, according to Heise . Later the attacker tried to report DomainFactory about the potential vulnerability using which he broke into its servers, but the hosting provider did not respond, and neither disclosed the breach to its customers. In that situation, the attacker head on to the company's support forum and broke the news with sample data of a few customers as proof, which forced DomainFactory to immediately shut down the forum website and initiate an investigation. Attacker G

An Internet domain registrar and web hosting company GoDaddy has patched a Cross-Site Request Forgery ( CSRF or XSRF) vulnerability that allowed hackers and malicious actors to hijack websites registered with the domain registration company. The vulnerability was reported to GoDaddy on Saturday by Dylan Saccomanni, a web application security researcher and penetration testing consultant in New York. Without any time delay, the company patched the bug in less than 24 hours after the blog was published. While managing an old domain registered on GoDaddy, Saccomanni stumbled across the bug and noticed that there was absolutely no protection against CSRF vulnerability at all on many GoDaddy DNS management actions. Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) is a method of attacking a website in which an attacker need to convince the victim to click on a specially crafted HTML exploit page that will make a request to the vulnerable website on their behalf. This common but rathe

U.S. has the top Security Agencies like NSA, FBI to tackle cyber crime and terrorism with their high profile surveillance technologies, but even after that U.S is proudly hosting 44% of the entire cloud based malware distribution. With the enhancement in Internet technology, Cloud computing has shown the possibility of existence and now has become an essential gradient for any Internet Identity. Cloud services are designed in such a way that it is easy to maintain, use, configure and can be scaled depending upon the requirement of the service being provided using the CLOUD technology with cost effective manner. Due to the Easy and Cost effective alternative of traditional computing, Malware writers are using the big cloud hosting platforms to quickly and effectively serve malware to Internet users, allowing them to bypass detection and geographic blacklisting by serving from a trusted provider. Hiding behind trusted domains and names is not something new. According to recently