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50,000 Websites Hacked Through MailPoet WordPress Plugin Vulnerability

50,000 Websites Hacked Through MailPoet WordPress Plugin Vulnerability
Jul 24, 2014
The users of WordPress, a free and open source blogging tool as well as content management system (CMS), that have a popular unpatched wordPress plugin installed are being cautioned to upgrade their sites immediately. A serious vulnerability in the WordPress plugin, MailPoet , could essentially allows an attacker to inject any file including malware, defacements and spam, whatever they wanted on the server and that too without any authentication. MailPoet, formerly known as Wysija Newsletter , is a WordPress plugin with more than 1.7 million downloads that allows developers running WordPress to send newsletters and manage subscribers within the content management system. In a blog post, the security researcher and CEO of the security firm Sucuri , Daniel Cid, pointed out the vulnerability to be serious and said that within three weeks since the vulnerability unveiled, over 50,000 websites have been remotely exploited by the cybercriminals to install backdoors targeting the vulner

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

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 Cookie Flaw Lets Hackers Hijack Your Account

WordPress Cookie Flaw Lets Hackers Hijack Your Account
May 27, 2014
Do you own a blog on WordPress.com website? If Yes, then you should take some extra cautious while signing into your Wordpress account from the next time when connected to public Wi-Fi, because it can be hacked without your knowledge, even if you have enabled two-factor authentication. Yan Zhu , a researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) noticed that the blogs hosted on WordPress are sending user authentication cookies in plain text, rather than encrypting it. So, it can be easily hijacked by even a Script-Kiddie looking to steal information. HIJACKING  AUTHENTICATION COOKIES When Wordpress users log into their account, WordPress.com servers set a web cookie with name " wordpress_logged_in " into the users' browser, Yan Zhu explained in a blog post. He noticed that this authentication cookie being sent over clear HTTP, in a very insecure manner. One can grab HTTP cookies from the same Wi-Fi Network by using some specialized tools, such as F

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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

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

45000 Wordpress blogs hacked on 2nd day of Spam campaign

45000 Wordpress blogs hacked on 2nd day of Spam campaign
Oct 17, 2012
Yesterday I have reported about a huge mysterious hack in wordpress servers, that cause compromise of 15000 wordpress account and hacker managed to post same spam article of " Money making sites " with title - " Im getting paid! " on each blog. We explained how hacker was earning in thousands of dollars by just sharing his Referral link on all these hacked sites. The campaign include some malicious domains where hacker is redirecting all readers and service from a well known email marketing company - Getresponse . Using the same dork -- site:wordpress.com "Im getting paid!" , today we tried to find out number of hacked accounts and once again another shocking number - its 59300 blogs in compromised list on 2nd day of hacking campaign. So many blogs have been compromised without any known method and wordpress team still not in action. As mentioned in last article, yesterday I tried to contact with Getresponse response team whose Email ser

15000 Wordpress blogs hacked for making money from Survey

15000 Wordpress blogs hacked for making money from Survey
Oct 16, 2012
Wordpress Security Team is sending out warning messages to thousands of wordpress users that their account has been compromised recently. Warning message include " We recently detected suspicious activity on your WordPress.com account. To protect your identity and keep your site safe, we've reset your password. " Message continue " To reset your password and get access to your account and blog, please visit WordPress.com. Click on "Forgot password?" in the Login toolbar to get started. It is very important that your password be unique because using the same password across different web applications increases the risk of your account being hacked. " Note: Wordpress officially has not announce yet any security breach news on their website, but these warning mails are silently received by compromised account holders. Method of hack is still not confirmed. But hacking 15000 blogs from wordpress server and posting same article on all sites most obvious can
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