Sucuri | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Unknown threat actors are abusing lesser-known code snippet plugins for WordPress to insert malicious PHP code in victim sites that are capable of harvesting credit card data. The campaign, observed by Sucuri on May 11, 2024, entails the abuse of a WordPress plugin called  Dessky Snippets , which allows users to add custom PHP code. It has over 200 active installations. Such attacks are known to leverage previously disclosed flaws in WordPress plugins or easily guessable credentials to gain administrator access and install other plugins (legitimate or otherwise) for post-exploitation. Sucuri said the Dessky Snippets plugin is used to insert a server-side PHP credit card skimming malware on compromised sites and steal financial data. "This malicious code was saved in the dnsp_settings option in the WordPress wp_options table and was designed to modify the checkout process in WooCommerce by manipulating the billing form and injecting...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a credit card skimmer that's concealed within a fake  Meta Pixel tracker script  in an attempt to evade detection. Sucuri said that the malware is injected into websites through tools that allow for custom code, such as WordPress plugins like  Simple Custom CSS and JS  or the " Miscellaneous Scripts " section of the Magento admin panel. "Custom script editors are popular with bad actors because they allow for external third party (and malicious) JavaScript and can easily pretend to be benign by leveraging naming conventions that match popular scripts like Google Analytics or libraries like JQuery," security researcher Matt Morrow  said . The bogus Meta Pixel tracker script identified by the web security company contains similar elements as its legitimate counterpart, but a closer examination reveals the addition of JavaScript code that substitutes references to the domain "connect.facebook[.]net" with ...

Everybody knows browser extensions are embedded into nearly every user's daily workflow, from spell checkers to GenAI tools. What most IT and security people don't know is that browser extensions' excessive permissions are a growing risk to organizations. LayerX today announced the release of the Enterprise Browser Extension Security Report 2025 , This report is the first and only report to merge public extension marketplace statistics with real-world enterprise usage telemetry. By doing so, it sheds light on one of the most underestimated threat surfaces in modern cybersecurity: browser extensions. The report reveals several findings that IT and security leaders will find interesting, as they build their plans for H2 2025. This includes information and analysis on how many extensions have risky permissions, which kinds of permissions are given, if extension developers are to be trusted, and more. Below, we bring key statistics from the report. Highlights from the Enterprise Browse...

A massive malware campaign dubbed  Sign1  has compromised over 39,000 WordPress sites in the last six months, using malicious JavaScript injections to redirect users to scam sites. The most recent variant of the malware is estimated to have infected no less than 2,500 sites over the past two months alone, Sucuri said in a report published this week. The attacks entail injecting rogue JavaScript into legitimate HTML widgets and plugins that allow for arbitrary JavaScript and other code to be inserted, providing attackers with an opportunity to add their malicious code. The XOR-encoded JavaScript code is subsequently decoded and used to execute a JavaScript file hosted on a remote server, which ultimately facilitates redirects to a  VexTrio -operated traffic distribution system (TDS) but only if certain criteria are met. What's more, the malware uses time-based randomization to fetch dynamic URLs that change every 10 minutes to get around blocklists. These domains are...

A new malware campaign is leveraging a high-severity security flaw in the Popup Builder plugin for WordPress to inject malicious JavaScript code. According to Sucuri, the campaign has  infected more than 3,900 sites  over the past three weeks. "These attacks are orchestrated from domains less than a month old, with registrations dating back to February 12th, 2024," security researcher Puja Srivastava  said  in a report dated March 7. Infection sequences involve the exploitation of CVE-2023-6000, a security vulnerability in Popup Builder that could be exploited to create rogue admin users and install arbitrary plugins. The shortcoming was exploited as part of a  Balada Injector campaign  earlier this January, compromising no less than 7,000 sites. The latest set of attacks lead to the injection of malicious code, which comes in two different variants and is designed to redirect site visitors to other sites such as phishing and scam pages. WordPress s...

Threat actors are conducting brute-force attacks against WordPress sites by leveraging malicious JavaScript injections, new findings from Sucuri reveal. The attacks, which take the form of distributed brute-force attacks, "target WordPress websites from the browsers of completely innocent and unsuspecting site visitors," security researcher Denis Sinegubko  said . The activity is part of a  previously documented attack wave  in which compromised WordPress sites were used to inject crypto drainers such as Angel Drainer directly or redirect site visitors to Web3 phishing sites containing drainer malware. The latest iteration is notable for the fact that the injections – found on  over 700 sites  to date – don't load a drainer but rather use a list of common and leaked passwords to brute-force other WordPress sites. The attack unfolds over five stages, enabling a threat actor to take advantage of already compromised websites to launch distributed brute-force ...

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...

Threat actors are targeting the education, government and business services sectors with a remote access trojan called  NetSupport RAT . "The delivery mechanisms for the NetSupport RAT encompass fraudulent updates, drive-by downloads, utilization of malware loaders (such as  GHOSTPULSE ), and various forms of phishing campaigns," VMware Carbon Black researchers said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The cybersecurity firm said it detected no less than 15 new infections related to NetSupport RAT in the last few weeks.  While NetSupport Manager started off as a  legitimate remote administration tool  for technical assistance and support, malicious actors have misappropriated the tool to their own advantage, using it as a beachhead for subsequent attacks. NetSupport RAT is typically downloaded onto a victim's computer via deceptive websites and fake browser updates. In August 2022, Sucuri  detailed  a campaign in which compromised WordPress...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a new sophisticated strain of malware that masquerades as a WordPress plugin to stealthily create administrator accounts and remotely control a compromised site. "Complete with a professional looking opening comment implying it is a caching plugin, this rogue code contains numerous functions, adds filters to prevent itself from being included in the list of activated plugins, and has pinging functionality that allows a malicious actor to check if the script is still operational, as well as file modification capabilities," Wordfence  said . The plugin also offers the ability to activate and deactivate arbitrary plugins on the site remotely as well as create rogue admin accounts with the username superadmin and a hard-coded password. In what's seen as an attempt to erase traces of compromise, it features a function named "_pln_cmd_hide" that's designed to remove the superadmin account when it's no longer req...

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 ...

A massive campaign has infected over 4,500 WordPress websites as part of a long-running operation that's been believed to be active since at least 2017. According to GoDaddy-owned Sucuri, the infections involve the injection of obfuscated JavaScript hosted on a malicious domain named "track[.]violetlovelines[.]com" that's designed to redirect visitors to undesirable sites. The latest  operation  is said to have been under way since December 26, 2022, according to  data  from urlscan.io. A prior wave seen in  early December 2022  impacted more than 3,600 sites, while another set of attacks recorded in  September 2022  ensnared more than 7,000 sites. The rogue code is inserted in the WordPress index.php file, with Sucuri noting that it has removed such changes from more than 33,000 files on the compromised sites in the past 60 days. "In recent months, this malware campaign has gradually switched from the notorious fake CAPTCHA push notificatio...

A new malicious campaign has compromised  over 15,000 WordPress websites  in an attempt to redirect visitors to bogus Q&A portals. "These malicious redirects appear to be designed to increase the authority of the attacker's sites for search engines," Sucuri researcher Ben Martin  said  in a report published last week, calling it a "clever black hat SEO trick." The search engine poisoning technique is designed to promote a "handful of fake low quality Q&A sites" that share similar website-building templates and are operated by the same threat actor. A notable aspect of the campaign is the ability of the hackers to modify over 100 files per website on average, an approach that contrasts dramatically from other attacks of this kind wherein only a limited number of files are tampered with to reduce footprint and escape detection. Some of the most commonly infected pages consist of wp-signup.php, wp-cron.php, wp-links-opml.php, wp-settings.php...

As many as 207 websites have been infected with malicious code designed to launch a cryptocurrency miner by leveraging WebAssembly (Wasm) on the browser. Web security company Sucuri, which published details of the campaign, said it launched an investigation after one of its clients had their computer slowed down significantly every time upon navigating to their own WordPress portal. This uncovered a compromise of a theme file to inject malicious JavaScript code from a remote server -- hxxps://wm.bmwebm[.]org/auto.js -- that's loaded whenever the website's page is accessed. "Once decoded, the contents of auto.js immediately reveal the functionality of a cryptominer which starts mining when a visitor lands on the compromised site," Sucuri malware researcher Cesar Anjos  said . What's more, the deobfuscated auto.js code makes use of WebAssembly to run low-level binary code directly on the browser. WebAssembly , which is supported by all major browsers, is a  b...

The Parrot traffic direction system (TDS) that came to light earlier this year has had a larger impact than previously thought, according to new research. Sucuri, which has been tracking the same campaign since February 2019 under the name "NDSW/NDSX," said that "the malware was one of the top infections" detected in 2021, accounting for more than 61,000 websites. Parrot TDS was  documented  in April 2022 by Czech cybersecurity company Avast, noting that the PHP script had ensnared web servers hosting more than 16,500 websites to act as a gateway for further attack campaigns. This involves appending a piece of malicious code to all JavaScript files on compromised web servers hosting content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress that are in turn said to be breached by taking advantage of weak login credentials and vulnerable plugins. Besides using different obfuscation tactics to conceal the code, the "injected JavaScript may also be found well indent...

Threat actors behind web skimming campaigns are leveraging malicious JavaScript code that mimics Google Analytics and Meta Pixel scripts in an attempt to sidestep detection. "It's a shift from earlier tactics where attackers conspicuously injected malicious scripts into e-commerce platforms and content management systems (CMSs) via vulnerability exploitation, making this threat highly evasive to traditional security solutions," Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team  said  in a new report. Skimming attacks, such as those by Magecart, are carried out with the goal of harvesting and exporting users' payment information, such as credit card details, that are entered into online payment forms in e-commerce platforms, typically during the checkout process. This is achieved by taking advantage of security vulnerabilities in third-party plugins and other tools to inject rogue JavaScript code into the online portals without the owners' knowledge. As skimming attacks h...

Researchers found Apache Server-Status Enabled on some popular site like php.net , cisco, nba.com, Cloudflare, Metacafe, Ford, yellow.com, and others. For backgorund, there is  a Module mod_status in   Apache server which allows a server administrator to find out how well their server is performing. A HTML page is presented that gives the current server statistics in an easily readable form. Basically,  mod_status provides information on your apache server activity and performance. The main security risk of using this module is only Information disclosure which includes infomation such as Server uptime, Individual request-response statistics and CPU usage of the working processes, Current HTTP requests, client IP addresses, requested paths, processed virtual hosts. , that could give a potential attacker information about how to attack the web server. Few popular brands showing their status online, discovered by  Daniel Cid from...