Search results for WordPress | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

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

Attention WordPress users! Your website could easily get hacked if you are using " Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder ," or " Ultimate Addons for Elementor " and haven't recently updated them to the latest available versions. Security researchers have discovered a critical yet easy-to-exploit authentication bypass vulnerability in both widely-used premium WordPress plugins that could allow remote attackers to gain administrative access to sites without requiring any password. What's more worrisome is that opportunistic attackers have already started exploiting this vulnerability in the wild within 2 days of its discovery in order to compromise vulnerable WordPress websites and install a malicious backdoor for later access. Both vulnerable plugins, made by software development company Brainstorm Force, are currently powering over hundreds of thousands of WordPress websites using Elementor and Beaver Builder frameworks, helping website admins and de

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,

Patches have been issued to contain a "severe" security vulnerability in UpdraftPlus, a WordPress plugin with over three million installations, that can be weaponized to download the site's private data using an account on the vulnerable sites. "All versions of UpdraftPlus from March 2019 onwards have contained a vulnerability caused by a missing permissions-level check, allowing untrusted users access to backups," the maintainers of the plugin said in an advisory published this week. Security researcher Marc-Alexandre Montpas of Automattic has been credited with discovering and reporting the vulnerability on February 14 that's been assigned the identifier  CVE-2022-0633  (CVSS score: 8.5). The issue impacts UpdraftPlus versions from 1.16.7 to 1.22.2. UpdraftPlus is a  backup and restoration solution  that's capable of performing full, manual, or scheduled backups of WordPress files, databases, plugins and themes, which can then be reinstated via th

A large distributed brute force attack against WordPress sites is understood to be occurring. A large botnet with more than 90,000 servers is attempting to log in by cycling through different usernames and passwords. According to a blog update on IXWebHosting, they are currently experiencing issues where there is a brute force attack on the default  WordPress  login pages of  their customers. " As you can see from our numbers, we were seeing 30 to 40 thousand attacks per day the last few months. In April 2013, it increased to 77,000 per day on average, reaching more than 100,000 attempts per day in the last few days. " Sucuri study says. This attack is greatly effecting Linux servers and attack is possibly conducted using  botnets . To solve the issue, hosting administrator block all connections to wp-login.php. " At this moment, we highly recommend you log into any WordPress installation you have and change the password to something that meets the

Security researchers are sounding the alarm over newly discovered vulnerabilities in some popular online learning management system ( LMS ) plugins that various organizations and universities use to offer online training courses through their WordPress-based websites. According to the Check Point Research Team, the three WordPress plugins in question — LearnPress , LearnDash , and LifterLMS — have security flaws that could permit students, as well as unauthenticated users, to pilfer personal information of registered users and even attain teacher privileges. "Because of coronavirus, we're doing everything from our homes, including our formal learning," Check Point Research's Omri Herscovici said. "The vulnerabilities found allow students, and sometimes even unauthenticated users, to gain sensitive information or take control of the LMS platforms." The three LMS systems are installed on approximately 100,000 different educational platforms, includi

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

Zero-day flaw in WordPress image utility allows to upload files and execute codes Mark Maunder , CEO of Seattle-based technology firm Feedjit, discovered the flaw after his own blog was hacked to load advertising content. He ended up tracing the issue back to TimThumb, which he uses on his blog. Hackers are exploiting a zero-day vulnerability affecting TimThumb, a free image resizing utility widely used on the blogging platform WordPress. Vulnerability in brief : An image resizing utility called timthumb.php is widely used by many WordPress themes. Google shows over 39 million results for the script name. If your WordPress theme is bundled with an unmodified timthumb.php as many commercial and free themes are, then you should immediately either remove it or edit it and set the $allowedSites array to be empty. The utility only does a partial match on hostnames allowing hackers to upload and execute arbitrary PHP code in your timthumb cache directory. I haven't audited the rest of

A critical security flaw in the Bricks theme for WordPress is being actively exploited by threat actors to run arbitrary PHP code on susceptible installations. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-25600 (CVSS score: 9.8), enables unauthenticated attackers to achieve remote code execution. It impacts all versions of the Bricks up to and including 1.9.6. It has been addressed by the theme developers in  version 1.9.6.1  released on February 13, 2024, merely days after WordPress security provider Snicco reported the flaw on February 10. While a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit has not been released, technical details have been  released  by both Snicco and Patchstack, noting that the underlying vulnerable code exists in the prepare_query_vars_from_settings() function. Specifically, it concerns the use of security tokens called "nonces" for verifying permissions, which can then be used to pass arbitrary commands for execution, effectively allowing a threat actor to seize control of a

Web hosting giant GoDaddy on Monday disclosed a data breach that resulted in the unauthorized access of data belonging to a total of 1.2 million active and inactive customers, making it the  third   security incident  to come to light since 2018. In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the world's largest domain registrar  said  that a malicious third-party managed to gain access to its  Managed WordPress  hosting environment on September 6 with the help of a compromised password, using it to obtain sensitive information pertaining to its customers. It's not immediately clear if the compromised password was secured with two-factor authentication. The Arizona-based company  claims  over 20 million customers, with more than 82 million domain names registered using its services. GoDaddy revealed it discovered the break-in on November 17. An investigation into the incident is ongoing and the company said it's "contacting all impacted custo

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.

Researchers from Wordfence have  sounded  the alarm about a "sudden" spike in cyber attacks attempting to exploit an unpatched flaw in a WordPress plugin called  Kaswara Modern WPBakery Page Builder Addons . Tracked as  CVE-2021-24284 , the issue is rated 10.0 on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system and relates to an unauthenticated arbitrary file upload that could be abused to gain code execution, permitting attackers to seize control of affected WordPress sites. Although the bug was originally  disclosed  in April 2021 by the WordPress security company, it continues to remain unresolved to date. To make matters worse, the plugin has been closed and is no longer actively maintained. Wordfence, which is protecting over 1,000 websites that have the plugin installed, said it has blocked an average of 443,868 attack attempts per day since the start of the month. The attacks have emanated from 10,215 IP addresses, with a majority of the exploitation attempts narrowed down

Security researchers have been warning about a critical vulnerability they discovered in one of a popular WordPress Live Chat plugin, which, if exploited, could allow unauthorized remote attackers to steal chat logs or manipulate chat sessions. The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2019-12498, resides in the "WP Live Chat Support" that is currently being used by over 50,000 businesses to provide customer support and chat with visitors through their websites. Discovered by cybersecurity researchers at Alert Logic , the flaw originates because of an improper validation check for authentication that apparently could allow unauthenticated users to access restricted REST API endpoints. As described by researchers, a potential remote attacker can exploit exposed endpoints for malicious purposes, including: stealing the entire chat history for all chat sessions, modifying or deleting the chat history, injecting messages into an active chat session, posing as a custome

A popular WordPress theme plugin with over 200,000 active installations contains a severe but easy-to-exploit software vulnerability that, if left unpatched, could let unauthenticated remote attackers compromise a wide range of websites and blogs. The vulnerable plugin in question is ' ThemeGrill Demo Importer ' that comes with free as well as premium themes sold by the software development company ThemeGrill. ThemeGrill Demo Importer plugin has been designed to allow WordPress site admins to import demo content, widgets, and settings from ThemeGrill, making it easier for them to quickly customize the theme. According to a report WebARX security company shared with The Hacker News, when a ThemeGrill theme is installed and activated, the affected plugin executes some functions with administrative privileges without checking whether the user running the code is authenticated and is an admin. The flaw could eventually allow unauthenticated remote attackers to wipe the e

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

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

Elementor, a WordPress website builder plugin with over five million active installations, has been found to be vulnerable to an authenticated remote code execution flaw that could be abused to take over affected websites. Plugin Vulnerabilities, which  disclosed  the flaw last week, said the bug was introduced in version 3.6.0 that was released on March 22, 2022. Roughly  37% of users  of the plugin are on version 3.6.x. "That means that malicious code provided by the attacker can be run by the website," the researchers said. "In this instance, it is possible that the vulnerability might be exploitable by someone not logged in to WordPress, but it can easily be exploited by anyone logged in to WordPress who has access to the WordPress admin dashboard." In a nutshell, the issue relates to a case of arbitrary file upload to affected websites, potentially leading to code execution. The bug has been addressed in the latest version of Elementor, with Patchstack 

Wow ! Backtrack Official Website's Server Hacked By Team Injector ! Attack on backtrack-linux.org From 1337 Team Injector   .    .--.   .--.   .---.      .           .'|        )      )      /      |             |     --:    --:      /    .-.| .-.  .  .   |        )      )    /    (   |(   ) |  | '---'  `--'   `--'    '      `-'`-`-'`-`--|                                           ;                                        `-'  Since we already tapped into exploit-db and their server lies  in  the same subnet  with  backtrack,  we  decided  to  check  out  their  mad security. Backtrack is run by muts, the same guy who also  administers exploit-db, so no wonder why it was super easy to get a shell...       $ uname -a Linux backtrack-linux.org 2.6.32.26-175.fc12.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed Dec 1 21:39:34 UTC 2010 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux $ id uid=48(apache) gid=494(apache) groups=494(apache) context=unconfined_u:system