Configuration files exist to make life easier for developers and website operators. In a world without configuration files, every instance of code that depended on a database connection could potentially require the connection details to be hard coded or manually entered. Other reusable data would be defined multiple times, causing code bloat and possible performance …Read More

Wordfence 7.8.0 is out! A huge thanks to our quality assurance team, our team of developers and our ops team for planning, implementing and releasing Wordfence 7.8.0. This release has several fixes to make Wordfence even more robust, and includes a fundamental change in the way our signup works. Since our launch in 2012, the …Read More

When setting up a WordPress website, it is easy to focus on the look and feel of the website, while overlooking the important aspect of security. This makes sense, because the security of a website is largely invisible until something goes wrong. Installing a cybersecurity plugin like Wordfence significantly reduces the chances of a successful …Read More

A Russian hacktivist group calling itself “The People’s Cyberarmy” called on its members to target the American Democratic party website at https://democrats.org with DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks this morning, November 8th, 2022, which is Election Day in the United States. A post in their Telegram channel, “CyberArmyofRussia_Reborn”, which has more than 7,000 subscribers …Read More

On October 5, 2022, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team responsibly disclosed a Missing Authorization vulnerability in Blog2Social, a WordPress plugin installed on over 70,000 sites that allows users to set up post sharing to various social networks. Vulnerable versions of the plugin make it possible for authenticated attackers with minimal permissions, such as subscribers, to …Read More

It has been over 6 years since we last raised our prices. Since then our team has more than doubled in size and we have introduced significant improvements to the core Wordfence product, launched a range of free and paid products, and introduced new services that include 24 hour incident response. Starting December 5th, 2022, …Read More

While performing routine security research, one of our threat analysts discovered the latest version of a Command and Control (C2) script, which is referred to as F-Automatical within the script’s code and was commonly known as FoxAuto in older versions. This is the seventh version of this automatic C2 script that is developed and distributed …Read More

Today, the Wordfence team is launching a Malware Hash Feed as part of our Wordfence Intelligence API. This gives our Enterprise users another way to rapidly and definitively identify malware targeting web applications. As the world’s foremost WordPress security provider, Wordfence has an expertly curated database of nearly three and a half million unique malicious …Read More

On October 17, 2022, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team began monitoring for activity targeting CVE-2022-42889, or “Text4Shell” on our network of 4 million websites. We started seeing activity targeting this vulnerability on October 18, 2022. Text4Shell is a vulnerability in the Apache Commons Text library versions 1.5 through 1.9 that can be used to achieve …Read More

The Wordfence Threat Intelligence team has been monitoring exploit attempts targeting two zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server tracked as CVE-2022-41040 and CVE-2022-41082, collectively known as ProxyNotShell. These vulnerabilities are actively being exploited in the wild. At the time of writing, we have observed 1,658,281 exploit attempts across our network of 4 million protected websites. …Read More

The WordPress 6.0.3 Security Update contains patches for a large number of vulnerabilities, most of which are low in severity or require a highly privileged user account or additional vulnerable code in order to exploit. As with every WordPress core release containing security fixes, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team analyzed the code changes in detail …Read More

This morning, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team began tracking exploit attempts targeting CVE-2022-40684 on our network of over 4 million protected websites. CVE-2022-40684 is a critical authentication bypass vulnerability in the administrative interface of Fortinet’s FortiGate firewalls, FortiProxy web proxies, and FortiSwitch Manager, and is being actively exploited in the wild¹,². At the time of …Read More

October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month in the U.S., and this year’s theme is “See Yourself in Cyber.” What is really being said by this theme is that we all have a role to play in cyber security, whether we work in the industry or not. With this in mind, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure …Read More

Wordfence 7.7.0 has just been released and as usual, it includes several awesome enhancements and updates for our security conscious WordPress publishers and e-commerce websites. This post goes into a little more detail on each change we’ve included. We don’t usually post additional detail like this, and we thought we’d give it a try, and …Read More

Vulnerabilities are a fact of life for anyone managing a website, even when using a well-established content management system like WordPress. Not all vulnerabilities are equal, with some allowing access to sensitive data that would normally be hidden from public view, while others could allow a malicious actor to take full control of an affected …Read More

On September 8, 2022, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team became aware of an actively exploited zero-day vulnerability being used to add a malicious administrator user to sites running the WPGateway plugin. We released a firewall rule to Wordfence Premium, Wordfence Care, and Wordfence Response customers to block the exploit on the same day, September 8, …Read More

Late evening, on September 6, 2022, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team was alerted to the presence of a vulnerability being actively exploited in BackupBuddy, a WordPress plugin we estimate has around 140,000 active installations. This vulnerability makes it possible for unauthenticated users to download arbitrary files from the affected site which can include sensitive information. …Read More

On August 30, 2022, the WordPress core team released WordPress version 6.0.2, which contains patches for 3 vulnerabilities, including a High Severity SQLi vulnerability in the Links functionality as well as two Medium Severity Cross-Site Scripting vulnerabilities. These patches have been backported to every version of WordPress since 3.7. WordPress has supported automatic core updates …Read More

As we continue to monitor the cyber situation in Ukraine, the data we are seeing shows some interesting trends. Not only has the volume of attacks continued rising throughout the war in Ukraine, the types of attacks have been varied. A common tactic of cyber criminals is to run automated exploit attempts, hitting as many …Read More

This morning the Wordfence team is launching Wordfence Intelligence live at Black Hat 2022 in Las Vegas. Our entire team is here in Las Vegas, including our international team members. I’d like to tell you more about what we’re launching and how Wordfence Intelligence will help us go even further to make the online community …Read More

The Russian invasion of Ukraine began on February 20, 2022. By mid-March it was clear the cyber-war had begun, and the attacks have been consistent ever since. Prior to this, on March 1, 2022, Wordfence reported on an attack campaign on Ukrainian university websites. In response, we deployed our real-time threat intelligence to all sites …Read More

Wordfence protects over 4 million websites around the world on 12,000 unique networks, and we block over 1.8 billion attacks targeting those websites every month. For years we have had a relationship with our customers that is a virtuous cycle: We receive attack reports from our customers at a rate of over 700 reports per …Read More

On June 24, 2022, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team initiated the responsible disclosure process for a Cross-Site Request Forgery vulnerability we discovered in Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart, a WordPress plugin installed on over 30,000 sites. This vulnerability made it possible for attackers to modify some of the plugin’s more advanced settings via a forged request. …Read More

On July 8, 2022 the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team initiated the responsible disclosure process for a vulnerability we discovered in “Download Manager,” a WordPress plugin that is installed on over 100,000 sites. This flaw makes it possible for an authenticated attacker to delete arbitrary files hosted on the server, provided they have access to create …Read More

The Log4j vulnerability, initially reported in November 2021, has affected millions of devices and applications around the world. It has the potential to allow a malicious actor to take full control of vulnerable devices. As a result of how Log4j controls the logging of strings and code, the vulnerability allows malicious actors to inject malicious …Read More

The Wordfence Threat Intelligence team has been monitoring a sudden increase in attack attempts targeting Kaswara Modern WPBakery Page Builder Addons. This ongoing campaign is attempting to take advantage of an arbitrary file upload vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2021-24284, which has been previously disclosed and has not been patched on the now closed plugin. As the …Read More

At Wordfence our business is to secure over 4 million WordPress websites and keep them secure. My background is in network operations, and then I transitioned into software development because my ops role was at a scale where I found myself writing a lot of code. This led me to founding startups, and ultimately into …Read More

On June 16, 2022, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team noticed a back-ported security update in Ninja Forms, a WordPress plugin with over one million active installations. As with all security updates in WordPress plugins and themes, our team analyzed the plugin to determine the exploitability and severity of the vulnerability that had been patched. We …Read More

At Wordfence, we see large amounts of threat actor data, and often that data tells unexpected stories. Taking a look at just the top five attacking IP addresses over a 30 day period, you might be surprised to find out where these attacks are originating, and what they are doing. When most people hear about …Read More

On May 30, 2022, Security Researcher Rafie Muhammad reported a reflected Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability to us that they discovered in Download Manager, a WordPress plugin installed on over 100,000 sites. On request, we assigned a vulnerability identifier of CVE-2022-1985. All Wordfence users, including Free, Premium, Care, and Response, are protected from exploits targeting this …Read More