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WordPress enables Free HTTPS Encryption for all Blogs with Custom Domain

WordPress enables Free HTTPS Encryption for all Blogs with Custom Domain

Apr 09, 2016
Do you own a custom domain or a blog under the wordpress.com domain name? If yes, then there is good news for you. WordPress is bringing free HTTPS to every blog and website that belongs to them in an effort to make the Web more secure. WordPress – free, open source and the most popular a content management system (CMS) system on the Web – is being used by over a quarter of all websites across the world, and this new move represents a massive shift over to a more secure Internet WordPress announced on Friday that it has partnered with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's " Let's Encrypt " project, allowing it to provide reliable and free HTTPS support for all of its customers that use custom domains for their WordPress.com blogs. Now every website hosted on wordpress.com has an SSL certificate and will display a green lock in the address bar. "For you, the users, that means you'll see secure encryption automatically deployed on ev
WordPress 4.2.3 Security Update Released, Patches Critical Vulnerability

WordPress 4.2.3 Security Update Released, Patches Critical Vulnerability

Jul 23, 2015
WordPress has just released the new version of its content management system (CMS), WordPress version 4.2.3 , to fix a critical security vulnerability that could have been exploited by hackers to take over websites, affecting the security of its Millions of sites. WordPress version 4.2.3 resolves a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) flaw that could allow any user with the Contributor or Author role to compromise a website, Gary Pendergast of the WordPress team wrote in a blog post on Thursday. Cross-site scripting is actually a vulnerability in the Web applications' code that opens up the target website to attacks. The vulnerability is one of the most favorite and commonly used flaws by cyber criminals. According to the company, the vulnerability could allow hackers to embed maliciously-crafted HTML, JavaScript, Flash, or other code to bypass WordPress's kses protection by fooling users into executing a malicious script on their computer system. This, in turn, le
Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Mar 21, 2024Operational Technology / SCADA Security
When you read reports about cyber-attacks affecting operational technology (OT), it's easy to get caught up in the hype and assume every single one is sophisticated. But are OT environments all over the world really besieged by a constant barrage of complex cyber-attacks? Answering that would require breaking down the different types of OT cyber-attacks and then looking back on all the historical attacks to see how those types compare.  The Types of OT Cyber-Attacks Over the past few decades, there has been a growing awareness of the need for improved cybersecurity practices in IT's lesser-known counterpart, OT. In fact, the lines of what constitutes a cyber-attack on OT have never been well defined, and if anything, they have further blurred over time. Therefore, we'd like to begin this post with a discussion around the ways in which cyber-attacks can either target or just simply impact OT, and why it might be important for us to make the distinction going forward. Figure 1 The Pu
WordPress Analytics Plugin Leaves 1.3 Million Sites Vulnerable to Hackers

WordPress Analytics Plugin Leaves 1.3 Million Sites Vulnerable to Hackers

Feb 25, 2015
A critical vulnerability has been discovered in one of the most popular plugins of the the WordPress content management platform that puts more than one Million websites at risks of being completely hijacked by the attackers. The vulnerability actually resides in most versions of a WordPress plugin called Wettable Powder Slimstat (WP-Slimstat) . While there are more than 70 million websites on the Internet currently running WordPress, more than 1.3 Million of them use the 'WP-Slimstat' Plugin , making it one of the popular plugins of WordPress for powerful real-time web analytic. All the WP-Slimstat versions prior to the latest release of Slimstat 3.9.6 contain an easily guessable 'secret' key which is used to sign data sent to and from the visiting end-user computers, explained in a blog post published Tuesday by Web security firm Sucuri. Once the weak 'secret' key is break, an attacker could perform an SQL injection attack against the target website
cyber security

Automated remediation solutions are crucial for security

websiteWing SecurityShadow IT / SaaS Security
Especially when it comes to securing employees' SaaS usage, don't settle for a longer to-do list. Auto-remediation is key to achieving SaaS security.
GHOST glibc Vulnerability Affects WordPress and PHP applications

GHOST glibc Vulnerability Affects WordPress and PHP applications

Jan 30, 2015
After the disclosure of extremely critical GHOST vulnerability in the GNU C library (glibc) — a widely used component of most Linux distributions, security researchers have discovered that PHP applications, including the WordPress Content Management System (CMS), could also be affected by the bug. " GHOST " is a serious vulnerability ( CVE-2015-0235 ), announced this week by the researchers of California-based security firm Qualys, that involves a heap-based buffer overflow in the glibc function name - "GetHOSTbyname()." Researchers said the vulnerability has been present in the glibc code since 2000. Though the major Linux distributors such as Red Hat , Debian and Ubuntu , have already updated their software against the flaw, GHOST could be used by hackers against only a handful of applications currently to remotely run executable code and silently gain control of a Linux server. As we explained in our previous article, heap-based buffer overflow was found
Website Backdoor Scripts Leverage the Pastebin Service

Website Backdoor Scripts Leverage the Pastebin Service

Jan 08, 2015
The popular copy and paste website ' Pastebin ' created a decade ago for software developers and even by hackers groups to share source code, dumps and stolen data, has more recently been leveraged by cyber criminals to target millions of users. Compromising a website and then hosting malware on it has become an old tactic for hackers, and now they are trying their hands in compromising vast majority of users in a single stroke. Researchers have discovered that hackers are now using Pastebin to spread malicious backdoor code. According to a blog post published yesterday by a senior malware researcher at Sucuri , Denis Sinegubko, the hackers are leveraging the weakness in older versions of the RevSlider , a popular and a premium WordPress plugin. The plugin comes packaged and bundled into the websites' themes in such a way that many website owners don't even know they have it. In order to exploit the vulnerability, first hackers look for a RevSlider plugin i
'SoakSoak' Malware Compromises 100,000 WordPress Websites

'SoakSoak' Malware Compromises 100,000 WordPress Websites

Dec 15, 2014
The users of WordPress , a free and open source blogging tool as well as content management system (CMS), are being informed of a widespread malware attack campaign that has already compromised more than 100,000 websites worldwide and still counting. The news broke throughout the WordPress community earlier Sunday morning when Google blacklisted over 11,000 domains due to the latest malware campaign , that has been brought by SoakSoak.ru , thus being dubbed the ' SoakSoak Malware ' epidemic. While there are more than 70 million websites on the Internet currently running WordPress, so this malware campaign could be a great threat to those running their websites on WordPress. Once infected, you may experience irregular website behavior including unexpected redirects to SoakSoak.ru web pages. You may also end up downloading malicious files onto your computer systems automatically without any knowledge. The search engine giant has already been on top of this infection a
Vulnerability in WPTouch WordPress Plugin Allows Hackers to Upload PHP backdoors

Vulnerability in WPTouch WordPress Plugin Allows Hackers to Upload PHP backdoors

Jul 15, 2014
If you own a mobile version for your Wordpress website using the popular WPtouch plugin, then you may expose to a critical vulnerability that could potentially allow any non-administrative logged-in user to upload malicious PHP files or backdoors to the target server without any admin privileges. WordPress is a free and an open source blogging tool as well as a content management system (CMS) with 30,000 plugins, each of which offers custom functions and features enabling users to tailor their sites to their specific needs. That is why, it is easy to setup and used by more than 73 million of websites across the world, and about 5.7 million them uses WPtouch plugin, making it one of the most popular plugins in the WordPress plugin directory. WPtouch is a mobile plugin that automatically enables a user friendly and elegant mobile theme for rendering your WordPress website contents on the mobile devices. User can easily customize many aspects of its appearance by the adm
Disqus Wordpress Plugin Flaw Leaves Millions of Blogs Vulnerable to Hackers

Disqus Wordpress Plugin Flaw Leaves Millions of Blogs Vulnerable to Hackers

Jun 30, 2014
A Remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability has been discovered in the comment and discussion service, Disqus plugin for the most popular Blogging Platform Wordpress . While there are more than 70 million websites on the Internet currently running WordPress, about 1.3 million of them use the ' Disqus Comment System ' Plugin, making it one of the popular plugins of Wordpress for web comments and discussions. The security team at the security firm Sucuri discovered a critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) flaw while analyzing some custom JSON parser of the Disqus plugin and found that the variable parsing function could allow anyone to execute commands on the server using insecurely coded PHP eval() function. WHO ARE VULNERABLE The Remote Code Execution ( RCE ) Vulnerability could be triggered by a remote attacker, only if it is using following application versions on the server/website. PHP version 5.1.6 or earlier WordPress 3.1.4 or earlier Wordpress Plugin
Zero-Day TimThumb WebShot Vulnerability leaves Thousands of Wordpress Blogs at Risk

Zero-Day TimThumb WebShot Vulnerability leaves Thousands of Wordpress Blogs at Risk

Jun 26, 2014
Yesterday we learned of a critical Zero-day vulnerability in a popular image resizing library called TimThumb, which is used in thousands WordPress themes and plugins. WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and a content management system (CMS) with more than 30,000 plugins, each of which offers custom functions and features enabling users to tailor their sites to their specific needs, therefore it is easy to setup and use, that's why tens of millions of websites across the world opt it. But if you or your company are the one using the popular image resizing library called " TimThumb " to resize large images into usable thumbnails that you can display on your site, then you make sure to update the file with the upcoming latest version and remember to check the TimThumb site regularly for the patched update. 0-Day REMOTE CODE EXECUTION & NO PATCH The critical vulnerability discovered by Pichaya Morimoto in the TimThumb Wordpress plugin version 2.8.13,
Vulnerabilities in 'All in One SEO Pack' Wordpress Plugin Put Millions of Sites At Risk

Vulnerabilities in 'All in One SEO Pack' Wordpress Plugin Put Millions of Sites At Risk

May 31, 2014
Multiple Serious vulnerabilities have been discovered in the most famous ' All In One SEO Pack ' plugin for WordPress, that put millions of Wordpress websites at risk. WordPress is easy to setup and use, that's why large number of people like it. But if you or your company is using ' All in One SEO Pack ' Wordpress plugin to optimize the website ranking in search engines, then you should update your SEO plugin immediately to the latest version of All in One SEO Pack 2.1.6 . Today, All in One SEO Pack plugin team has released an emergency security update that patches two critical privilege escalation vulnerabilities and one cross site scripting (XSS) flaw, discovered by security researchers at Sucuri, a web monitoring and malware clean up service. More than 73 million websites on the Internet run their websites on the WordPress publishing platform and more than 15 million websites are currently using All in One SEO Pack plugin for search engine optimization. Acco
162,000 vulnerable WordPress websites abused to perform DDoS Attack

162,000 vulnerable WordPress websites abused to perform DDoS Attack

Mar 12, 2014
DDoS attacks are a growing issue facing by governments and businesses. In a recent attack, thousands of legitimate WordPress websites have been hijacked by hackers, without the need for them to be compromised. Instead, the attackers took advantage of an existing WordPress vulnerability ( CVE-2013-0235 ) - " Pingback Denial of Service possibility ". According to security company Sucuri , in a recent amplification attack more than 162,000 legitimate Wordpress sites were abused to launch a large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack . The attack exploited an issue with the XML-RPC (XML remote procedure call) of the WordPress, use to provide services such as Pingbacks, trackbacks, which allows anyone to initiate a request from WordPress to an arbitrary site. The functionality should be used to generate cross references between blogs, but it can easily be used for a single machine to originate millions of requests from multiple locations. " Any
DDoS Attacks originated from thousands of .EDU and .GOV WordPress Blogs

DDoS Attacks originated from thousands of .EDU and .GOV WordPress Blogs

Dec 04, 2013
In a recent cyber attack on a Forum site, thousands of outdated legitimate WordPress blogs were abused to perform DDOS attacks using previously known vulnerabilities . After analyzing the Log file from the victim's server, we have noticed many Wordpress CMS based educational (.EDU) and Government (.GOV) websites from where the attack was originated. In the past we have reported about many such cyber attacks, where attackers hacked into the Wordpress blogs using password brute-force attack or they used the  PINGBACK  vulnerability in older versions of Wordpress without compromising the server. WordPress has a built in functionality called Pingback , which allows anyone to initiate a request from WordPress to an arbitrary site and it can be used for a single machine to originate millions of requests from multiple locations. We have seen more than 100,000 IP addresses involved in the recent DDOS attack and the victim's Forum website received more than 40,000 requests in 7 mi
Thousands of Wordpress blogs compromised to perform DDOS attack

Thousands of Wordpress blogs compromised to perform DDOS attack

Sep 25, 2013
There is currently a Mega cyber attack campaign being launched on a large number of WordPress websites across the Internet.  In April, 2012 we reported about a large distributed brute force attack against millions of WordPress sites were occurring, out of that hackers are successful to compromise 90,000 servers to create a large Botnet  of Wordpress hosts. According to the DDOS attack logs report  received from a ' The Hacker News ' reader ' Steven Veldkamp ', victim's website was under under heavy DDOS attack recently, coming from various compromised Wordpress based websites. Possibly using the brute force attack on WordPress administrative portals with the a world list of the most commonly used username and password combinations, attackers are taking control of many poorly secured WordPress Hosts. After analyzing the piece of a DDOS attack Log file from timing 23/Sep/2013:13:03:13 +0200 to 23/Sep/2013:13:02:47 +0200, we found that in 26 second attacker was
New Botnet Campaign 'Fort Disco' Brute-Forcing Thousands of WordPress, Joomla Websites

New Botnet Campaign 'Fort Disco' Brute-Forcing Thousands of WordPress, Joomla Websites

Aug 09, 2013
Password theft has been a growing problem within the security community. Researchers at Arbor Networks have uncovered a botnet called Fort Disco that was used to compromise more than 6000 websites based on popular CMSs such as WordPress , Joomla and Datalife Engine. The Fort Disco botnet is currently made up of nearly 25,000 Windows machines and receives a list of sites to attack from a central command and control server. The bots receive also a list of common username-password combinations, typically composed of default combinations with password options including admin or 123456. Arbor Networks security researcher Matthew Bing said the attack has several advanced features that make it next to impossible to fully track and they obtained precious info on the botnet exploiting a misconfiguration on the attackers' side that made possible the analysis of logs on several of the six command and control servers discovered. " We stumbled upon these detailed logs the attacker left open o
Drupal resets 1 Million Passwords after Data Breach

Drupal resets 1 Million Passwords after Data Breach

May 31, 2013
A Drupal data breach was announced by the official Drupal Association, that Passwords for almost one million accounts on the Drupal.org website are being reset after hackers gained unauthorized access to sensitive user data. The security of the open source content management system has been compromised via third-party software installed on the Drupal.org server infrastructure, and was not the result of a vulnerability within Drupal itself. As countermeasure it is resetting the passwords for nearly one million accounts in the wake of a data breach . Information exposed includes usernames, email addresses, and country information, as well as hashed passwords . The Drupal.org hasn't revealed the name of the third-party application exploited during the attack. Evidence of the Drupal data breach was found during a routine security audit: " Upon discovering the files during a security audit, we shut down the association.drupal.org website to mitigate any possible ongoing security i
Millions of WordPress sites exploitable for DDoS Attacks using Pingback mechanism

Millions of WordPress sites exploitable for DDoS Attacks using Pingback mechanism

May 01, 2013
Distributed Denial of Service attacks have increased in scale, intensity and frequency. The wide range of motives for these attacks political , criminal, or social makes every merchant or organization with an online presence a potential target. Over the weekend Incapsula mitigated a unique DDoS attack against a large gaming website, in which they have discovered a DDoS attack using thousands of legitimate WordPress blogs without the need for them to be compromised. Incapsula released the list of approximately 2,500 WordPress sites from where the attack was originated, including some very large sites like Trendmicro.com, Gizmodo.it and Zendesk.com . In a recent report , we posted about another method for DDoS attacks using DNS amplification , where a DNS request is made to an open DNS resolver with the source IP address forged so that it is the IP address of the targeted site to which the response is thus sent, but this new method uses HTTP rather than DNS. The
Outdated version of WordPress leads to MasterCard Hack

Outdated version of WordPress leads to MasterCard Hack

Jan 09, 2013
On tip of a readers, yesterday we came across a new MasterCard hack, performed by  Syrian Electronic Army . Hackers was able to breach MasterCard Blog ( https://insights.mastercard.com ) and make a new blog post on the website with title " Hacked By Syrian Electronic Army " on January 5, 2013. For now MasterCard deleted that post, but readers can check Google cache . Today we tried to contact the hacker, but may be they are busy in Hacking Next Target , I started my investigation that how they can hack such a big economic website's blog. Starting from very first step, Information gathering about your target. Simple by reviewing the source code we found that MasterCard blog is using Wordpress. We all know, WordPress is particular a popular attack vector for cyber criminals. To know this, I just tried to access the readme.html file of CMS , that's it - MasterCard #fail ! They are using an old  Wordpress 3.3.2  version, instead of the current version 3.
WordPress plugin W3 Total Cache critical Vulnerability disclosed

WordPress plugin W3 Total Cache critical Vulnerability disclosed

Dec 26, 2012
One of the most popular Wordpress Plugin called " W3 Total Cache " which is used to Improve site performance and user experience via caching, having potential vulnerability. On Christmas day, someone disclose it on full-disclosure site that how a plugin misconfiguration leads to possible Wordpress cms hack. The loophole is actually activated on the fact that how W3TC stores the database cache. Jason disclosed that cache data is stored in public accessible directory, from where a malicious attack can can retrieve password hashes and other database information. Default location where this plugin stores data is " /wp-content/w3tc/dbcache/ " and if directory listing is enabled, attacker can browse and download it. He said," Even with directory listings off, cache files are by default publicly downloadable, and the key values / file names of the database cache items are easily predictable. " Because the plugin is very famous ,so this makes quite
WordPress Pingback Vulnerability Serves DDoS attack feature

WordPress Pingback Vulnerability Serves DDoS attack feature

Dec 18, 2012
Accunetix a web application security company reported vulnerabilities found in the Wordpress Pingback feature. According to report, Pingback vulnerability exists in the WordPress blogging platform that could leak information and lead to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. " WordPress has an XMLRPC API that can be accessed through the xmlrpc.php file. When WordPress is processing pingbacks, it's trying to resolve the source URL, and if successful, will make a request to that URL and inspect the response for a link to a certain WordPress blog post. If it finds such a link, it will post a comment on this blog post announcing that somebody mentioned this blog post in their blog. " Bogdan Calin explained . Pingback is one of three types of linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles. Some weblog software, such as Mo
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