Web Skimming | 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 hunters are warning of a sophisticated web skimmer campaign that leverages a legacy application programming interface (API) from payment processor Stripe to validate stolen payment information prior to exfiltration. "This tactic ensures that only valid card data is sent to the attackers, making the operation more efficient and potentially harder to detect," Jscrambler researchers Pedro Fortuna, David Alves, and Pedro Marrucho said in a report. As many as 49 merchants are estimated to have been affected by the campaign to date. Fifteen of the compromised sites have taken action to remove the malicious script injections. The activity is assessed to be ongoing since at least August 20, 2024. Details of the campaign were first flagged by security firm Source Defense towards the end of February 2025, detailing the web skimmer's use of the " api.stripe[.]com/v1/sources " API, which allows applications to accept various payment methods. The endpoint has...

Multiple content management system (CMS) platforms like WordPress, Magento, and OpenCart have been targeted by a new credit card web skimmer called Caesar Cipher Skimmer. A web skimmer refers to malware that is injected into e-commerce sites with the goal of stealing financial and payment information .  According to Sucuri, the latest campaign entails making malicious modifications to the checkout PHP file associated with the WooCommerce plugin for WordPress ("form-checkout.php") to steal credit card details. "For the past few months, the injections have been changed to look less suspicious than a long obfuscated script," security researcher Ben Martin said , noting the malware's attempt to masquerade as Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. Specifically, it utilizes the same substitution mechanism employed in Caesar cipher to encode the malicious piece of code into a garbled string and conceal the external domain that's used to host the payload. ...

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...