WordPress | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Malicious actors are exploiting a critical vulnerability in the Hunk Companion plugin for WordPress to install other vulnerable plugins that could open the door to a variety of attacks. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-11972 (CVSS score: 9.8), affects all versions of the plugin prior to 1.9.0. The plugin has over 10,000 active installations. "This flaw poses a significant security risk, as it enables attackers to install vulnerable or closed plugins, which can then be exploited for attacks such as Remote Code Execution (RCE), SQL Injection, Cross‑Site Scripting (XSS), or even the creation of administrative backdoors," WPScan said in a report. To make matters worse, attackers could leverage outdated or abandoned plugins to circumvent security measures, tamper with database records, execute malicious scripts, and seize control of the sites. WPScan said it uncovered the security defect when analyzing an infection on an unspecified WordPress site, finding that threat actors ...

Two critical security flaws impacting the Spam protection, Anti-Spam, and FireWall plugin for WordPress could allow an unauthenticated attacker to install and enable malicious plugins on susceptible sites and potentially achieve remote code execution. The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2024-10542 and CVE-2024-10781 , carry a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10.0. They were addressed in versions 6.44 and 6.45 released this month. Installed on over 200,000 WordPress sites, CleanTalk's Spam protection,f Anti-Spam, FireWall plugin is advertised as a "universal anti-spam plugin" that blocks spam comments, registrations, surveys, and more. According to Wordfence, both vulnerabilities concern an authorization bypass issue that could allow a malicious actor to install and activate arbitrary plugins. This could then pave the way for remote code execution if the activated plugin is vulnerable of its own. The plugin is "vulnerable to unauthorized Arbitrary Plugin ...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

A critical authentication bypass vulnerability has been disclosed in the Really Simple Security (formerly Really Simple SSL) plugin for WordPress that, if successfully exploited, could grant an attacker to remotely gain full administrative access to a susceptible site. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-10924 (CVSS score: 9.8), impacts both free and premium versions of the plugin. The software is installed on over 4 million WordPress sites.  "The vulnerability is scriptable, meaning that it can be turned into a large-scale automated attack, targeting WordPress websites," Wordfence security researcher István Márton said . Following responsible disclosure on November 6, 2024, the shortcoming has been patched in version 9.1.2 released a week later. This risk of possible abuse has prompted the plugin maintainers to work with WordPress to force-update all sites running this plugin prior to public disclosure. According to Wordfence, the authentication bypass vulnerabilit...

A high-severity security flaw has been disclosed in the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress that could allow an unauthenticated threat actor to elevate their privileges and perform malicious actions. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-50550 (CVSS score: 8.1), has been addressed in version 6.5.2 of the plugin. "The plugin suffers from an unauthenticated privilege escalation vulnerability which allows any unauthenticated visitor to gain administrator level access after which malicious plugins could be uploaded and installed," Patchstack security researcher Rafie Muhammad said in an analysis. LiteSpeed Cache is a popular site acceleration plugin for WordPress that, as the name implies, comes with advanced caching functionality and optimization features. It's installed on over six million sites. The newly identified issue, per Patchstack, is rooted in a function named is_role_simulation and is similar to an earlier flaw that was publicly documented back in August ...

The maintainers of the Jetpack WordPress plugin have released a security update to remediate a critical vulnerability that could allow logged-in users to access forms submitted by others on a site. Jetpack, owned by WordPress maker Automattic, is an all-in-one plugin that offers a comprehensive suite of tools to improve site safety, performance, and traffic growth. It's used on 27 million WordPress sites, according to its website . The issue is said to have been identified by Jetpack during an internal security audit and has persisted since version 3.9.9, released in 2016. The vulnerability resides in the Contact Form feature in Jetpack, and "could be used by any logged in users on a site to read forms submitted by visitors on the site," Jetpack's Jeremy Herve said . Jetpack said it's worked closely with the WordPress.org Security Team to automatically update the plugin to a safe version on installed sites. The shortcoming has been addressed in the followi...

A new high-severity security flaw has been disclosed in the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress that could enable malicious actors to execute arbitrary JavaScript code under certain conditions. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-47374 (CVSS score: 7.2), has been described as a stored cross-site scripting ( XSS ) vulnerability impacting all versions of the plugin up to and including 6.5.0.2. It was addressed in version 6.5.1 on September 25, 2024, following responsible disclosure by Patchstack Alliance researcher TaiYou. "It could allow any unauthenticated user from stealing sensitive information to, in this case, privilege escalation on the WordPress site by performing a single HTTP request," Patchstack said in a report.  The flaw stems from the manner in which the plugin the "X-LSCACHE-VARY-VALUE" HTTP header value is parsed without adequate sanitization and output escaping, thereby allowing for injection of arbitrary web scripts. That said, it's worth poi...

WordPress.org has announced a new account security measure that will require accounts with capabilities to update plugins and themes to activate two-factor authentication (2FA) mandatorily. The enforcement is expected to come into effect starting October 1, 2024. "Accounts with commit access can push updates and changes to plugins and themes used by millions of WordPress sites worldwide," the maintainers of the open-source, self-hosted version of the content management system (CMS) said . "Securing these accounts is essential to preventing unauthorized access and maintaining the security and trust of the WordPress.org community." Besides requiring mandatory 2FA, WordPress.org said it's introducing what's called SVN passwords, which refers to a dedicated password for committing changes. This, it said, is an effort to introduce a new layer of security by separating users' code commit access from their WordPress.org account credentials. "This ...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered yet another critical security flaw in the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress that could allow unauthenticated users to take control of arbitrary accounts. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-44000 (CVSS score: 7.5), impacts versions before and including 6.4.1. It has been addressed in version 6.5.0.1.  "The plugin suffers from an unauthenticated account takeover vulnerability which allows any unauthenticated visitor to gain authentication access to any logged-in users and at worst can gain access to an Administrator level role after which malicious plugins could be uploaded and installed," Patchstack researcher Rafie Muhammad said . The discovery follows an extensive security analysis of the plugin, which previously led to the identification of a critical privilege escalation flaw ( CVE-2024-28000 , CVSS score: 9.8). LiteSpeed Cache is a popular caching plugin for the WordPress ecosystem with over 5 million active installat...

A critical security flaw has been disclosed in the WPML WordPress multilingual plugin that could allow authenticated users to execute arbitrary code remotely under certain circumstances. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-6386 (CVSS score: 9.9), impacts all versions of the plugin before 4.6.13, which was released on August 20, 2024. Arising due to missing input validation and sanitization, the issue makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Contributor-level access and above, to execute code on the server. WPML is a popular plugin used for building multilingual WordPress sites. It has over one million active installations. Security researcher stealthcopter, who discovered and reported CVE-2024-6386, said the problem lies in the plugin's handling of shortcodes that are used to insert post content such as audio, images, and videos. "Specifically, the plugin uses Twig templates for rendering content in shortcodes but fails to properly sanitize input, leadi...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a critical security flaw in the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress that could permit unauthenticated users to gain administrator privileges. "The plugin suffers from an unauthenticated privilege escalation vulnerability which allows any unauthenticated visitor to gain Administrator level access after which malicious plugins could be uploaded and installed," Patchstack's Rafie Muhammad said in a Wednesday report. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-28000 (CVSS score: 9.8), has been patched in version 6.4 of the plugin released on August 13, 2024. It impacts all versions of the plugin, including and prior to 6.3.0.1. LiteSpeed Cache is one of the most widely used caching plugins in WordPress with over five million active installations. In a nutshell, CVE-2024-28000 makes it possible for an unauthenticated attacker to spoof their user ID and register as an administrative-level user, effectively granting them privileges to...

A maximum-severity security flaw has been disclosed in the WordPress GiveWP donation and fundraising plugin that exposes more than 100,000 websites to remote code execution attacks. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-5932 (CVSS score: 10.0), impacts all versions of the plugin prior to version 3.14.2, which was released on August 7, 2024. A security researcher, who goes by the online alias villu164, has been credited with discovering and reporting the issue. The plugin is "vulnerable to PHP Object Injection in all versions up to, and including, 3.14.1 via deserialization of untrusted input from the 'give_title' parameter," Wordfence said in a report this week. "This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to inject a PHP Object. The additional presence of a POP chain allows attackers to execute code remotely, and to delete arbitrary files." The vulnerability is rooted in a function named "give_process_donation_form()," which is used to vali...

Threat actors have been observed using swap files in compromised websites to conceal a persistent credit card skimmer and harvest payment information. The sneaky technique, observed by Sucuri on a Magento e-commerce site's checkout page, allowed the malware to survive multiple cleanup attempts, the company said. The skimmer is designed to capture all the data into the credit card form on the website and exfiltrate the details to an attacker-controlled domain named "amazon-analytic[.]com," which was registered in February 2024. "Note the use of the brand name; this tactic of leveraging popular products and services in domain names is often used by bad actors in an attempt to evade detection," security researcher Matt Morrow said . This is just one of many defense evasion methods employed by the threat actor, which also includes the use of swap files ("bootstrap.php-swapme") to load the malicious code while keeping the original file ("bootstra...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered an attack campaign that targets various Israeli entities with publicly-available frameworks like Donut and Sliver. The campaign, believed to be highly targeted in nature, "leverage target-specific infrastructure and custom WordPress websites as a payload delivery mechanism, but affect a variety of entities across unrelated verticals, and rely on well-known open-source malware," HarfangLab said in a report last week. The French company is tracking the activity under the name Supposed Grasshopper. It's a reference to an attacker-controlled server ("auth.economy-gov-il[.]com/SUPPOSED_GRASSHOPPER.bin"), to which a first-stage downloader connects to. This downloader, written in Nim, is rudimentary and is tasked with downloading the second-stage malware from the staging server. It's delivered by means of a virtual hard disk (VHD) file that's suspected to be propagated via custom WordPress sites as part of a drive-...

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. ...

Multiple WordPress plugins have been backdoored to inject malicious code that makes it possible to create rogue administrator accounts with the aim of performing arbitrary actions. "The injected malware attempts to create a new administrative user account and then sends those details back to the attacker-controlled server," Wordfence security researcher Chloe Chamberland said in a Monday alert. "In addition, it appears the threat actor also injected malicious JavaScript into the footer of websites that appears to add SEO spam throughout the website." The admin accounts have the usernames "Options" and "PluginAuth," with the account information exfiltrated to the IP address 94.156.79[.]8. It's currently not known how the unknown attackers behind the campaign managed to compromise the plugins, but the earliest signs of the software supply chain attack date back to June 21, 2024. The plugins in question are no longer available for downlo...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a malicious Python package uploaded to the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository that's designed to deliver an information stealer called Lumma (aka LummaC2). The package in question is crytic-compilers, a typosquatted version of a legitimate library named crytic-compile . The rogue package was downloaded 441 times before it was taken down by PyPI maintainers. "The counterfeit library is interesting in that, in addition [to] being named after the legitimate Python utility, 'crytic-compile,' it aligns its version numbers with the real library," Sonatype security researcher Ax Sharma said . "Whereas the real library's latest version stops at 0.3.7, the counterfeit 'crytic-compilers' version picks up right here, and ends at 0.3.11 — giving off the impression that this is a newer version of the component." In a further attempt to keep up the ruse, some versions of crytic-compilers (e.g., 0.3.9) we...

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...

A high-severity flaw impacting the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress is being actively exploited by threat actors to create rogue admin accounts on susceptible websites. The  findings  come from WPScan, which said that the vulnerability ( CVE-2023-40000 , CVSS score: 8.3) has been leveraged to set up bogus admin users with the names wpsupp‑user and wp‑configuser. CVE-2023-40000, which was  disclosed  by Patchstack in February 2024, is a stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that could permit an unauthenticated user to elevate privileges by means of specially crafted HTTP requests. The flaw was addressed in October 2023 in version 5.7.0.1. It's worth noting that the latest version of the plugin is 6.2.0.1, which was  released  on April 25, 2024. LiteSpeed Cache has over 5 million active installations, with statistics showing that versions other than 5.7, 6.0, 6.1, and 6....

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a previously undocumented malware targeting Android devices that uses compromised WordPress sites as relays for its actual command-and-control (C2) servers for detection evasion. The malware, codenamed  Wpeeper , is an ELF binary that leverages the HTTPS protocol to secure its C2 communications. "Wpeeper is a typical backdoor Trojan for Android systems, supporting functions such as collecting sensitive device information, managing files and directories, uploading and downloading, and executing commands," researchers from the QiAnXin XLab team  said . The ELF binary is embedded within a repackaged application that purports to be the  UPtodown App Store  app for Android (package name "com.uptodown"), with the APK file acting as a delivery vehicle for the backdoor in a manner that evades detection. The Chinese cybersecurity firm said it discovered the malware after it detected a  Wpeeper artifact  with ...

Threat actors are attempting to actively exploit a critical security flaw in the ValvePress Automatic plugin for WordPress that could allow site takeovers. The shortcoming, tracked as  CVE-2024-27956 , carries a CVSS score of 9.9 out of a maximum of 10. It impacts all versions of the plugin prior to 3.92.0. The issue has been resolved in version 3.92.1 released on February 27, 2024, although the release notes make no mention of it. "This vulnerability, a SQL injection (SQLi) flaw, poses a severe threat as attackers can exploit it to gain unauthorized access to websites, create admin‑level user accounts, upload malicious files, and potentially take full control of affected sites," WPScan  said  in an alert this week. According to the Automattic-owned company, the issue is rooted in the plugin's user authentication mechanism, which can be trivially circumvented to execute arbitrary SQL queries against the database by means of specially crafted requests. In ...