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All-In-One Security (AIOS), a WordPress plugin installed on over one million sites, has issued a security update after a bug introduced in version 5.1.9 of the software caused users' passwords being added to the database in plaintext format. "A malicious site administrator (i.e. a user already logged into the site as an admin) could then have read them," UpdraftPlus, the maintainers of AIOS,  said . "This would be a problem if those site administrators were to try out those passwords on other services where your users might have used the same password. If those other services' logins are not protected by two-factor authentication, this could be a risk to the affected website." The issue surfaced nearly three weeks ago when a user of the plugin  reported  the behavior, stating they were "absolutely shocked that a security plugin is making such a basic security 101 error." AIOS also noted that the updates remove the existing logged data from th

Every website owner or webmaster grapples with the issue of spam on their website forms. The volume of spam can be so overwhelming that finding useful information within it becomes quite challenging. What exacerbates this issue is that spam can populate your public pages, appearing in comments and reviews. You likely understand how this can damage your website's reputation, affect search results, overload your web server, and divert your focus from website development. Website owners and webmasters need a solution to this problem. When selecting an anti-spam solution, the following requirements should be taken into account: The solution must operate automatically, eliminating the need for manual spam checks. It should provide a quick and efficient method of accuracy control. It must be universal, protecting all website forms simultaneously. It should be easy and straightforward to install and set up. It should not require any extra steps from your visitors, ensuring they do

In today's digital world, where connectivity is rules all, endpoints serve as the gateway to a business's digital kingdom. And because of this, endpoints are one of hackers' favorite targets.  According to the IDC,  70% of successful breaches start at the endpoint . Unprotected endpoints provide vulnerable entry points to launch devastating cyberattacks. With IT teams needing to protect more endpoints—and more kinds of endpoints—than ever before, that perimeter has become more challenging to defend. You need to improve your endpoint security, but where do you start? That's where this guide comes in.  We've curated the top 10 must-know endpoint security tips that every IT and security professional should have in their arsenal. From identifying entry points to implementing EDR solutions, we'll dive into the insights you need to defend your endpoints with confidence.  1. Know Thy Endpoints: Identifying and Understanding Your Entry Points Understanding your network's

As many as 200,000 WordPress websites are at risk of ongoing attacks exploiting a critical unpatched security vulnerability in the Ultimate Member plugin. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2023-3460 (CVSS score: 9.8), impacts all versions of the Ultimate Member plugin, including the latest version (2.6.6) that was released on June 29, 2023. Ultimate Member is a  popular plugin  that facilitates the creation of user-profiles and communities on WordPress sites. It also provides account management features. "This is a very serious issue: unauthenticated attackers may exploit this vulnerability to create new user accounts with administrative privileges, giving them the power to take complete control of affected sites," WordPress security firm WPScan  said  in an alert. Although details about the flaw have been withheld due to active abuse, it stems from an inadequate blocklist logic that allows attackers to alter the wp_capabilities user meta value of a new user to that of an admini

A critical security flaw has been disclosed in miniOrange's  Social Login and Register plugin  for WordPress that could enable a malicious actor to log in as any user-provided information about email address is already known. Tracked as CVE-2023-2982 (CVSS score: 9.8), the authentication bypass flaw impacts all versions of the plugin, including and prior to 7.6.4. It was addressed on June 14, 2023, with the release of version 7.6.5 following responsible disclosure on June 2, 2023. "The vulnerability makes it possible for an unauthenticated attacker to gain access to any account on a site including accounts used to administer the site, if the attacker knows, or can find, the associated email address," Wordfence researcher István Márton  said . The issue is rooted in the fact that the encryption key used to secure the information during login using social media accounts is hard-coded, thus leading to a scenario where attackers could create a valid request with a properl

A critical security flaw has been disclosed in the WordPress "Abandoned Cart Lite for WooCommerce" plugin that's  installed  on more than 30,000 websites. "This vulnerability makes it possible for an attacker to gain access to the accounts of users who have abandoned their carts, who are typically customers but can extend to other high-level users when the right conditions are met," Defiant's Wordfence  said  in an advisory. Tracked as CVE-2023-2986, the shortcoming has been rated 9.8 out of 10 for severity on the CVSS scoring system. It impacts all versions of the plugin, including and prior to versions 5.14.2. The problem, at its core, is a case of authentication bypass that arises as a result of insufficient encryption protections that are applied when customers are notified when they have abandoned their shopping carts on e-commerce sites without completing the purchase. Specifically, the encryption key is hard-coded in the plugin, thereby allowing

A security flaw has been uncovered in the WooCommerce Stripe Gateway WordPress plugin that could lead to the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information. The flaw, tracked as  CVE-2023-34000 , impacts versions 7.4.0 and below. It was addressed by the plugin maintainers in version 7.4.1, which shipped on May 30, 2023. WooCommerce Stripe Gateway  allows  e-commerce websites to directly accept various payment methods through Stripe's payment processing API. It boasts of over 900,000 active installations. According to Patchstack security researcher Rafie Muhammad, the plugin suffers from what's called an unauthenticated Insecure direct object references ( IDOR ) vulnerability, which allows a bad actor to bypass authorization and access resources. Specially, the problem stems from the insecure handling of order objects and a lack of adequate access control mechanism in the plugin's 'javascript_params' and 'payment_fields' functions of the plugin. &quo

WordPress has issued an automatic update to address a critical flaw in the  Jetpack plugin  that's installed on over five million sites. The vulnerability, which was unearthed during an internal security audit, resides in an API present in the plugin since  version 2.0 , which was released in November 2012. "This vulnerability could be used by authors on a site to manipulate any files in the WordPress installation," Jetpack  said  in an advisory. 102 new versions of Jetpack have been released to remediate the bug. While there is no evidence the issue has been exploited in the wild, it's not uncommon for flaws in popular WordPress plugins to be leveraged by threat actors looking to take over the sites for malicious ends. This is not the first time severe security weaknesses in Jetpack have prompted WordPress to force install the patches. In November 2019, Jetpack released  version 7.9.1  to fix a defect in the way the plugin handled embed code that had existed since July 2017 (ve

A security vulnerability has been disclosed in the popular WordPress plugin  Essential Addons for Elementor  that could be potentially exploited to achieve elevated privileges on affected sites. The issue, tracked as CVE-2023-32243, has been addressed by the plugin maintainers in version 5.7.2 that was shipped on May 11, 2023. Essential Addons for Elementor has over one million active installations. "This plugin suffers from an unauthenticated privilege escalation vulnerability and allows any unauthenticated user to escalate their privilege to that of any user on the WordPress site," Patchstack researcher Rafie Muhammad  said . Successful exploitation of the flaw could permit a threat actor to reset the password of any arbitrary user as long as the malicious party is aware of their username. The shortcoming is believed to have existed since version 5.4.0. This can have serious ramifications as the flaw could be weaponized to reset the password associated with an administ

Users of Advanced Custom Fields plugin for WordPress are being urged to update version 6.1.6 following the discovery of a security flaw. The issue, assigned the identifier CVE-2023-30777, relates to a case of reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) that could be abused to inject arbitrary executable scripts into otherwise benign websites. The plugin, which is available both as a free and pro version, has over  two million active installations . The issue was discovered and reported to the maintainers on May 2, 2023. "This vulnerability allows any unauthenticated user from stealing sensitive information to, in this case, privilege escalation on the WordPress site by tricking a privileged user to visit the crafted URL path," Patchstack researcher Rafie Muhammad  said . Reflected XSS  attacks usually occur when victims are tricked into clicking on a bogus link sent via email or another route, causing the malicious code to be sent to the vulnerable website, which reflects the

Threat actors have been observed leveraging a legitimate but outdated WordPress plugin to surreptitiously backdoor websites as part of an ongoing campaign, Sucuri  revealed  in a report published last week. The plugin in question is Eval PHP, released by a developer named flashpixx. It allows users to insert PHP code pages and posts of WordPress sites that's then executed every time the posts are opened in a web browser. While  Eval PHP  has never received an update in 11 years, statistics gathered by WordPress show that it's installed on over 8,000 websites, with the number of downloads skyrocketing from one or two on average since September 2022 to 6,988 on March 30, 2023. On April 23, 2023, alone, it was downloaded 2,140 times. The plugin has racked up 23,110 downloads over the past seven days. GoDaddy-owned Sucuri said it observed some infected websites' databases injected with malicious code into the  "wp_posts" table , which stores a site's  posts,

Over one million WordPress websites are estimated to have been infected by an ongoing campaign to deploy malware called  Balada Injector   since 2017 . The massive campaign, per GoDaddy's Sucuri, "leverages all known and recently discovered theme and plugin vulnerabilities" to breach WordPress sites. The attacks are known to play out in waves once every few weeks. "This campaign is easily identified by its preference for  String.fromCharCode  obfuscation, the use of freshly registered domain names hosting malicious scripts on random subdomains, and by redirects to various scam sites," security researcher Denis Sinegubko  said . The websites include  fake tech support , fraudulent lottery wins, and rogue CAPTCHA pages urging users to turn on notifications to 'Please Allow to verify, that you are not a robot,' thereby enabling the actors to send spam ads. The report builds on  recent findings  from Doctor Web, which detailed a Linux malware family th

Unknown threat actors are actively exploiting a recently patched security vulnerability in the Elementor Pro website builder plugin for WordPress. The flaw, described as a case of broken access control, impacts versions 3.11.6 and earlier. It was addressed by the plugin maintainers in version 3.11.7 released on March 22. "Improved code security enforcement in WooCommerce components," the Tel Aviv-based company  said  in its release notes. The premium plugin is  estimated  to be used on over 12 million sites. Successful exploitation of the high-severity flaw allows an authenticated attacker to complete a takeover of a WordPress site that has WooCommerce enabled. "This makes it possible for a malicious user to turn on the registration page (if disabled) and set the default user role to administrator so they can create an account that instantly has the administrator privileges," Patchstack  said  in an alert of March 30, 2023. "After this, they are likely t

Patches have been released for a critical security flaw impacting the WooCommerce Payments plugin for WordPress, which is installed on over 500,000 websites. The flaw, if left unresolved, could enable a bad actor to gain unauthorized admin access to impacted stores, the company said in an advisory on March 23, 2023. It impacts versions 4.8.0 through 5.6.1. Put differently, the issue could permit an "unauthenticated attacker to impersonate an administrator and completely take over a website without any user interaction or social engineering required," WordPress security company Wordfence  said . The vulnerability appears to reside in a PHP file called "class-platform-checkout-session.php," Sucuri researcher Ben Martin  noted . Credited with discovering and reporting the vulnerability is Michael Mazzolini of Swiss penetration testing company GoldNetwork. WooCommerce also  said  it worked with WordPress to auto-update sites using affected versions of the softwar

Six different law firms were targeted in January and February 2023 as part of two disparate threat campaigns distributing  GootLoader  and  FakeUpdates  (aka SocGholish) malware strains. GootLoader , active since late 2020, is a first-stage downloader that's capable of delivering a wide range of secondary payloads such as Cobalt Strike and ransomware. It notably  employs  search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning to funnel victims searching for business-related documents toward drive-by download sites that drop the JavaScript malware. In the  campaign  detailed by cybersecurity company eSentire, the threat actors are said to have compromised legitimate, but vulnerable, WordPress websites and added new blog posts without the owners' knowledge. "When the computer user navigates to one of these malicious web pages and hits the link to download the purported business agreement, they are unknowingly downloading GootLoader," eSentire researcher Keegan Keplinger  said

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 notification scam pages to

WordPress sites are being targeted by a previously unknown strain of Linux malware that exploits flaws in over two dozen plugins and themes to compromise vulnerable systems. "If sites use outdated versions of such add-ons, lacking crucial fixes, the targeted web pages are injected with malicious JavaScripts," Russian security vendor Doctor Web  said  in a report published last week. "As a result, when users click on any area of an attacked page, they are redirected to other sites." The attacks involve weaponizing a list of known security vulnerabilities in 19 different plugins and themes that are likely installed on a WordPress site, using it to deploy an implant that can target a specific website to further expand the network. It's also capable of injecting JavaScript code retrieved from a remote server in order to redirect the site visitors to an arbitrary website of the attacker's choice. Doctor Web said it identified a second version of the backdoor

A new Go-based botnet has been spotted scanning and brute-forcing self-hosted websites using the WordPress content management system (CMS) to seize control of targeted systems. "This new brute forcer is part of a new campaign we have named GoTrim because it was written in Go and uses ':::trim:::' to split data communicated to and from the C2 server," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researchers Eduardo Altares, Joie Salvio, and Roy Tay  said . The active campaign, observed since September 2022, utilizes a bot network to perform distributed brute-force attacks in an attempt to login to the targeted web server. A successful break-in is followed by the operator installing a downloader PHP script in the newly compromised host that, in turn, is designed to deploy the "bot client" from a hard-coded URL, effectively adding the machine to the growing network. In its present form, GoTrim does not have self-propagation capabilities of its own, nor can it distribute oth

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

WordPress security company Wordfence on Thursday said it started detecting exploitation attempts targeting the newly disclosed flaw in Apache Commons Text on October 18, 2022. The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2022-42889  aka Text4Shell , has been assigned a severity ranking of 9.8 out of a possible 10.0 on the CVSS scale and affects versions 1.5 through 1.9 of the library. It's also similar to the now infamous  Log4Shell  vulnerability in that the  issue  is rooted in the manner  string substitutions  carried out during  DNS, script, and URL lookups  could lead to the execution of arbitrary code on susceptible systems when passing untrusted input. "The attacker can send a crafted payload remotely using 'script,' 'dns,' and 'url' lookups to achieve arbitrary remote code execution," the Zscaler ThreatLabZ team explained . A  successful exploitation of the flaw  can enable a threat actor to open a reverse shell connection with the vulnerable