PHP | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a new campaign targeting WordPress sites that disguises the malware as a security plugin. The plugin, which goes by the name "WP-antymalwary-bot.php," comes with a variety of features to maintain access, hide itself from the admin dashboard, and execute remote code. "Pinging functionality that can report back to a command-and-control (C&C) server is also included, as is code that helps spread malware into other directories and inject malicious JavaScript responsible for serving ads," Wordfence's Marco Wotschka said in a report. First discovered during a site cleanup effort in late January 2025, the malware has since been detected in the wild with new variants. Some of the other names used for the plugin are listed below - addons.php wpconsole.php wp-performance-booster.php scr.php Once installed and activated, it provides threat actors administrator access to the dashboard and makes use of the REST API...

Threat actors are exploiting a severe security flaw in PHP to deliver cryptocurrency miners and remote access trojans (RATs) like Quasar RAT. The vulnerability, assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2024-4577 , refers to an argument injection vulnerability in PHP affecting Windows-based systems running in CGI mode that could allow remote attackers to run arbitrary code. Cybersecurity company Bitdefender said it has observed a surge in exploitation attempts against CVE-2024-4577 since late last year, with a significant concentration reported in Taiwan (54.65%), Hong Kong (27.06%), Brazil (16.39%), Japan (1.57%), and India (0.33%). About 15% of the detected exploitation attempts involve basic vulnerability checks using commands like "whoami" and "echo <test_string>." Another 15% revolve around commands used for system reconnaissance, such as process enumeration, network discovery, user and domain information, and system metadata gathering. Martin Zugec, technic...

Three security flaws have been disclosed in the open-source PHP package Voyager that could be exploited by an attacker to achieve one-click remote code execution on affected instances. "When an authenticated Voyager user clicks on a malicious link, attackers can execute arbitrary code on the server," Sonar researcher Yaniv Nizry said in a write-up published earlier this week. The identified issues, which remain unpatched to date despite responsible disclosure on September 11, 2024, are listed below - CVE-2024-55417 - An arbitrary file write vulnerability in the "/admin/media/upload" endpoint CVE-2024-55416 - A reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the "/admin/compass" endpoint CVE-2024-55415 - An arbitrary file leak and deletion vulnerability  A malicious attacker could leverage Voyager's media upload feature to upload a malicious file in a manner that bypasses MIME type verification, and make use of a polyglot file that ap...

Cybersecurity researchers have exposed a new campaign that targets web servers running PHP-based applications to promote gambling platforms in Indonesia. "Over the past two months, a significant volume of attacks from Python-based bots has been observed, suggesting a coordinated effort to exploit thousands of web apps," Imperva researcher Daniel Johnston said in an analysis. "These attacks appear tied to the proliferation of gambling-related sites, potentially as a response to the heightened government scrutiny ." The Thales-owned company said it has detected millions of requests originating from a Python client that includes a command to install GSocket (aka Global Socket), an open-source tool that can be used to establish a communication channel between two machines regardless of the network perimeter. It's worth noting that GSocket has been put to use in many a cryptojacking operation in recent months, not to mention even exploiting the access provi...

A previously undocumented backdoor named Msupedge has been put to use against a cyber attack targeting an unnamed university in Taiwan. "The most notable feature of this backdoor is that it communicates with a command-and-control (C&C) server via DNS traffic," the Symantec Threat Hunter Team, part of Broadcom, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The origins of the backdoor are presently unknown as are the objectives behind the attack. The initial access vector that likely facilitated the deployment of Msupedge is said to involve the exploitation of a recently disclosed critical flaw impacting PHP ( CVE-2024-4577 , CVSS score: 9.8), which could be used to achieve remote code execution . The backdoor in question is a dynamic-link library (DLL) that's installed in the paths "csidl_drive_fixed\xampp\" and "csidl_system\wbem\." One of the DLLs, wuplog.dll, is launched by the Apache HTTP server (httpd). The parent process for the second ...

Multiple threat actors have been observed exploiting a recently disclosed security flaw in PHP to deliver remote access trojans, cryptocurrency miners, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnets. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2024-4577 (CVSS score: 9.8), which allows an attacker to remotely execute malicious commands on Windows systems using Chinese and Japanese language locales. It was publicly disclosed in early June 2024. "CVE-2024-4577 is a flaw that allows an attacker to escape the command line and pass arguments to be interpreted directly by PHP," Akamai researchers Kyle Lefton, Allen West, and Sam Tinklenberg said in a Wednesday analysis. "The vulnerability itself lies in how Unicode characters are converted into ASCII." The web infrastructure company said it began observing exploit attempts against its honeypot servers targeting the PHP flaw within 24 hours of it being public knowledge. This included exploits designed to deliver a remote...

Details have emerged about a new critical security flaw impacting PHP that could be exploited to achieve remote code execution under certain circumstances. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-4577 , has been described as a CGI argument injection vulnerability affecting all versions of PHP installed on the Windows operating system. According to DEVCORE security researchers, the shortcoming makes it possible to bypass protections put in place for another security flaw, CVE-2012-1823 . "While implementing PHP, the team did not notice the Best-Fit feature of encoding conversion within the Windows operating system," security researcher Orange Tsai said . "This oversight allows unauthenticated attackers to bypass the previous protection of CVE-2012-1823 by specific character sequences. Arbitrary code can be executed on remote PHP servers through the argument injection attack." Following responsible disclosure on May 7, 2024, a fix for the vulnerability has bee...

WordPress has released version 6.4.2 with a patch for a critical security flaw that could be exploited by threat actors by combining it with another bug to execute arbitrary PHP code on vulnerable sites. "A remote code execution vulnerability that is not directly exploitable in core; however, the security team feels that there is a potential for high severity when combined with some plugins, especially in multisite installations," WordPress  said . According to WordPress security company Wordfence, the  issue  is rooted in the WP_HTML_Token class that was introduced in version 6.4 to improve HTML parsing in the block editor. A threat actor with the ability to exploit a PHP object injection vulnerability present in any other plugin or theme to chain the two issues to execute arbitrary code and seize control of the targeted site. "If a  POP [property-oriented programming] chain  is present via an additional plugin or theme installed on the target system, it ...

The maintainers of the open-source file-sharing software ownCloud have warned of three critical security flaws that could be exploited to disclose sensitive information and modify files. A brief description of the vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2023-49103 (CVSS score: 10.0) - Disclosure of sensitive credentials and configuration in containerized deployments impacting graphapi versions from 0.2.0 to 0.3.0. CVE-2023-49105 (CVSS score: 9.8) - WebDAV Api Authentication Bypass using Pre-Signed URLs impacting core versions from 10.6.0 to 10.13.0. CVE-2023-49104 (CVSS score: 9.0) - Subdomain Validation Bypass impacting oauth2 prior to version 0.6.1. "The 'graphapi' app relies on a third-party library that provides a URL. When this URL is accessed, it reveals the configuration details of the PHP environment (phpinfo)," the company  said  of the first flaw. "This information includes all the environment variables of the web server. In containerized deplo...

PHP software package repository Packagist revealed that an "attacker" gained access to four inactive accounts on the platform to hijack over a dozen packages with over 500 million installs to date. "The attacker forked each of the packages and replaced the package description in  composer.json  with their own message but did not otherwise make any malicious changes," Packagist's Nils Adermann  said . "The package URLs were then changed to point to the forked repositories." The four user accounts are said to have had access to a total of 14 packages, including multiple Doctrine packages. The incident took place on May 1, 2023. The complete list of impacted packages is as follows - acmephp/acmephp acmephp/core acmephp/ssl doctrine/doctrine-cache-bundle doctrine/doctrine-module doctrine/doctrine-mongo-odm-module doctrine/doctrine-orm-module doctrine/instantiator growthbook/growthbook jdorn/file-system-cache jdorn/sql-formatter khanamiryan/...

A PHP version of an information-stealing malware called  Ducktail  has been discovered in the wild being distributed in the form of cracked installers for legitimate apps and games, according to the latest findings from Zscaler. "Like older versions (.NetCore), the latest version (PHP) also aims to exfiltrate sensitive information related to saved browser credentials, Facebook account information, etc.," Zscaler ThreatLabz researchers Tarun Dewan and Stuti Chaturvedi  said . Ducktail, which emerged on the threat landscape in late 2021, is attributed to an unnamed Vietnamese threat actor, with the malware primarily designed to hijack Facebook business and advertising accounts. The financially motivated cybercriminal operation was  first documented  by Finnish cybersecurity company WithSecure (formerly F-Secure) in late July 2022. While previous versions of the malware were found to use Telegram as a command-and-control (C2) channel to exfiltrate informatio...

Researchers have disclosed details about a now-patched high-severity security flaw in Packagist, a PHP software package repository, that could have been exploited to mount software supply chain attacks. "This vulnerability allows gaining control of  Packagist ," SonarSource researcher Thomas Chauchefoin  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Packagist is used by the PHP package manager Composer to determine and download software dependencies that are included by developers in their projects. The disclosure comes as planting malware in open source repositories is turning into an attractive conduit for performing  software supply chain attacks . Tracked as  CVE-2022-24828  (CVSS score: 8.8), the  issue  has been described as a case of command injection and is linked to another similar Composer bug ( CVE-2021-29472 ) that came to light in April 2021, suggesting an inadequate patch. "An attacker controlling a Git or Mercurial repository...

VoIP phones using Digium's software have been targeted to drop a web shell on their servers as part of an attack campaign designed to exfiltrate data by downloading and executing additional payloads. "The malware installs multilayer obfuscated PHP backdoors to the web server's file system, downloads new payloads for execution, and schedules recurring tasks to re-infect the host system," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42  said  in a Friday report. The unusual activity is said to have commenced in mid-December 2021 and targets Asterisk, a widely used software implementation of a private branch exchange (PBX) that runs on the open-source Elastix Unified Communications Server. Unit 42 said the intrusions share similarities with the  INJ3CTOR3 campaign  that Israeli cybersecurity firm Check Point disclosed in November 2020, alluding to the possibility that they could be a "resurgence" of the previous attacks. Coinciding with the sudden surge is the public disclos...

QNAP, Taiwanese maker of network-attached storage (NAS) devices, on Wednesday said it's in the process of fixing a critical three-year-old PHP vulnerability that could be abused to achieve remote code execution. "A vulnerability has been reported to affect PHP versions 7.1.x below 7.1.33, 7.2.x below 7.2.24, and 7.3.x below 7.3.11 with improper nginx config," the hardware vendor  said  in an advisory. "If exploited, the vulnerability allows attackers to gain remote code execution." The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2019-11043 , is rated 9.8 out of 10 for severity on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system. That said, it's required that Nginx and php-fpm are running in appliances using the following QNAP operating system versions - QTS 5.0.x and later QTS 4.5.x and later QuTS hero h5.0.x and later QuTS hero h4.5.x and later QuTScloud c5.0.x and later "As QTS, QuTS hero or QuTScloud does not have nginx installed by default, QNAP NAS are not aff...

A 15-year-old security vulnerability has been disclosed in the PEAR PHP repository that could permit an attacker to carry out a supply chain attack, including obtaining unauthorized access to publish rogue packages and execute arbitrary code. "An attacker exploiting the first one could take over any developer account and publish malicious releases, while the second bug would allow the attacker to gain persistent access to the central PEAR server," SonarSource vulnerability researcher Thomas Chauchefoin  said  in a write-up published this week. PEAR, short for PHP Extension and Application Repository, is a framework and distribution system for reusable PHP components. One of the issues, introduced in a  code commit  made in March 2007 when the feature was originally implemented, relates to the use of the cryptographically insecure  mt_rand()  PHP function in the password reset functionality that could allow an attacker to "discover a valid password rese...

Researchers have disclosed an unpatched security vulnerability in " dompdf ," a PHP-based HTML to PDF converter, that, if successfully exploited, could lead to remote code execution in certain configurations. "By injecting CSS into the data processed by dompdf, it can be tricked into storing a malicious font with a .php file extension in its font cache, which can later be executed by accessing it from the web," Positive Security researchers Maximilian Kirchmeier and Fabian Bräunlein  said  in a report published today. In other words, the flaw  allows  a malicious party to upload font files with a .php extension to the web server, which can then be activated by using an  XSS vulnerability  to inject HTML into a web page before it's rendered as a PDF. This meant that the attacker could potentially navigate to the uploaded .php script, effectively permitting remote code execution on the server. This can have significant consequences on websites that req...

Critical security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in a WordPress plugin known as PHP Everywhere that's used by more than 30,000 websites worldwide and could be abused by an attacker to execute arbitrary code on affected systems. PHP Everywhere is  used  to flip the switch on PHP code across WordPress installations, enabling users to insert and execute PHP-based code in the content management system's Pages, Posts, and Sidebar. The three issues, all rated 9.9 out of a maximum of 10 on the CVSS rating system, impact versions 2.0.3 and below, and are as follows - CVE-2022-24663  - Remote Code Execution by Subscriber+ users via shortcode CVE-2022-24664  - Remote Code Execution by Contributor+ users via metabox, and CVE-2022-24665  - Remote Code Execution by Contributor+ users via gutenberg block Successful exploitation of the three vulnerabilities could result in the execution of malicious PHP code that could be leveraged to achieve a complete site tak...

The maintainers of Composer, a package manager for PHP, have shipped an update to address a critical vulnerability that could have allowed an attacker to execute arbitrary commands and "backdoor every PHP package," resulting in a supply-chain attack. Tracked as CVE-2021-29472, the security issue was discovered and reported on April 22 by researchers from  SonarSource , following which a hotfix was deployed less than 12 hours later. "Fixed command injection vulnerability in HgDriver/HgDownloader and hardened other VCS drivers and downloaders," Composer  said  its  release notes  for versions 2.0.13 and 1.10.22 published on Wednesday. "To the best of our knowledge the vulnerability has not been exploited." Composer  is billed as a tool for dependency management in PHP, enabling easy installation of packages relevant to a project. It also allows users to install PHP applications that are available on  Packagist , a repository that aggregates all publ...

The maintainers of the PHP programming language have issued an update regarding the security incident that came to light late last month, stating that the actors may have gotten hold of a user database containing their passwords to make unauthorized changes to the repository. "We no longer believe the git.php.net server has been compromised. However, it is possible that the master.php.net user database leaked," Nikita Popov  said  in a message posted on its mailing list on April 6. On March 28, unidentified actors used the names of Rasmus Lerdorf and Popov to  push malicious commits  to the "php-src" repository hosted on the git.php.net server that involved adding a backdoor to the PHP source code in an instance of a software supply chain attack. While this was initially treated as a compromise of the git.php.net server, further investigation into the incident has revealed that the commits were a result of pushing them using HTTPS and password-based authentica...

In yet another instance of a software supply chain attack, unidentified actors hacked the official Git server of the PHP programming language and pushed unauthorized updates to insert a secret backdoor into its source code. The two malicious commits were pushed to the self-hosted "php-src" repository hosted on the git.php.net server, illicitly using the names of Rasmus Lerdorf, the author of the programming language, and Nikita Popov, a software developer at Jetbrains. The changes are said to have been made yesterday on March 28. "We don't yet know how exactly this happened, but everything points towards a compromise of the git.php.net server (rather than a compromise of an individual git account)," Popov  said  in an announcement. The changes, which were committed as " Fix Typo " in an attempt to slip through undetected as a typographical correction, involved provisions for execution of arbitrary PHP code. "This line executes PHP code fro...