A Critical Vulnerability in VMWare’s vCenter Server threatens some of the largest data centers in the world. An actively exploited 0-day in macOS was used to take screen shots of infected computers. CodeCov claims another victim as Japanese e-Commerce unicorn Mercari reports a massive data breach. Domino’s India and Air India suffer from large-scale data …Read More

On April 8, 2021, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team initiated the responsible disclosure process for several vulnerabilities discovered in Simple 301 Redirects by BetterLinks, a WordPress plugin installed on over 300,000 sites. One of these flaws made it possible for unauthenticated users to update redirects for the site allowing an attacker to redirect all site …Read More

Four memory corruption vulnerabilities are being actively exploited on Android devices and nearly 2 dozen popular Android apps exposed over 100 Million users’ sensitive information in cloud databases. Over 600,000 sites using WP Statistics required a patch to fix a blind SQL injection vulnerability. WP User Avatar undergoes a dramatic rebranding to ProfilePress, adding completely …Read More

On March 13, 2021, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team initiated responsible disclosure for a vulnerability in WP Statistics, a plugin installed on over 600,000 WordPress sites. The vulnerability allowed any site visitor to extract sensitive information from a site’s database via Time-Based Blind SQL Injection. We received a response to our initial disclosure the same …Read More

A ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline affected fuel availability in 17 southeastern US states, and Bloomberg reported that Colonial Pipeline paid $5 million to DarkSide, a Russian ransomware service provider. The Biden Administration issued an executive order to increase US cybersecurity defenses. WordPress 5.7.2 was released to patch a critical object injection vulnerability in PHPMailer. …Read More

On May 13, 2021 01:00 UTC, WordPress core released a security patch for a Critical Object Injection vulnerability in PHPMailer, the component that WordPress uses to send emails by default. If your site is set to allow auto updating of minor point releases, your site has probably already updated to WordPress 5.7.2. While we do …Read More

On February 2, 2021, our Threat Intelligence team responsibly disclosed the details of a vulnerability in External Media, a WordPress plugin used by over 8,000 sites. This flaw made it possible for authenticated users, such as subscribers, to upload arbitrary files on any site running the plugin. This vulnerability could be used to achieve remote …Read More

A vulnerability discovered in Packagist, which is used by Composer to manage PHP package requests, could have allowed attackers to trick Composer into downloading backdoored source code, potentially affecting all WordPress sites. Packagist reports that it’s not aware of any exploits. A SQL injection vulnerability was patched in the CleanTalk AntiSpam plugin installed on over …Read More

On March 4, 2021, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team initiated responsible disclosure for a Time-Based Blind SQL Injection vulnerability discovered in Spam protection, AntiSpam, FireWall by CleanTalk, a WordPress plugin installed on over 100,000 sites. This vulnerability could be used to extract sensitive information from a site’s database, including user emails and password hashes, all …Read More

Apple patches a gatekeeper bypass vulnerability that has been exploited in the wild on MacOS. Though this vulnerability requires some social engineering to exploit, it is believed to have been actively exploited since January 9, 2021. Some Digital Ocean customers were affected by a data breach exposing personally identifiable information. A WordPress trac conversation considers …Read More

On March 5, 2021, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team wrapped up an investigation that led to the discovery of a privilege escalation vulnerability along with several additional vulnerabilities in Store Locator Plus, a WordPress plugin installed on over 9,000 sites. We initially reached out to the plugin’s developer on March 5, 2021. We received no …Read More

Attacks on unpatched SolarWinds systems continue. We’re now learning of a supply chain attack that started in late January 2021 affecting 29,000 customers of Codecov, as well as a zero-day under active attack affecting customers of PulseSecure VPN. Customers of these three services are well known enterprise and government organizations. In the WordPress space, there …Read More

Today, April 21, 2021, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team became aware of a critical 0-day vulnerability that is being actively exploited in Kaswara Modern WPBakery Page Builder Addons, a premium plugin that we estimate has over 10,000 installations. This vulnerability was reported this morning to WPScan by “Robin Goodfellow.” The exploited flaw makes it possible …Read More

On February 11, 2021, our Threat Intelligence team responsibly disclosed several vulnerabilities in Redirection for Contact Form 7, a WordPress plugin used by over 200,000 sites. One of these flaws made it possible for unauthenticated attackers to generate arbitrary nonces for any function. The second flaw made it possible for authenticated attackers to install arbitrary …Read More

Over the past 10 days, Wordfence has blocked over 14 million attacks targeting Privilege Escalation Vulnerabilities in The Plus Addons for Elementor Pro on over 75% of sites reporting attacks during this period. By April 13, 2021, this campaign was targeting more sites than all other campaigns put together. Number of sites attacked per day …Read More

An FBI initiative began remotely removing webshells from infected Microsoft Exchange servers. WordPress 5.7.1 was released with a few security patches. Over 15 Elementor add on plugins were found to have vulnerabilities similar to those found in the main Elementor plugin; these additional plugin vulnerabilities affected over 3.5 million sites with over 100 vulnerable endpoints. …Read More

This post has been updated with additional plugins that have been patched since its original publication. We will continue to add plugins as they are patched. Over the last few weeks, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team has responsibly disclosed vulnerabilities in more than 15 of the most popular addon plugins for Elementor, which are collectively …Read More

A new Wix ad campaign targets WordPress but ends up being tone deaf in both content and strategy. New details emerge about the PHP compromise, but the full story remains unclear. Facebook user data from 2019 ends up on the dark web, and Have I Been Pwned adds a phone number check to help users …Read More

On February 15, 2021, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team began the responsible disclosure process for several vulnerabilities in WP Page Builder, a plugin installed on over 10,000 sites. These vulnerabilities allowed any logged-in user, including subscribers, to access the page builder’s editor and make changes to existing posts on the site by default. Additionally, any …Read More

A few months ago on Wordfence Live, we reviewed some of the worst website hacks we’ve ever seen. Every one of them started with poor password choices and escalated into a disastrous event for the site owner. From these common hacks, we have many cautionary tales of site security that could have been prevented by …Read More

The self-hosted Git repository for PHP was compromised, with attackers adding a backdoor to a development version of PHP 8.1. The intrusion was detected by the PHP community quickly, and no production environments were affected. Ubiquiti experienced an intrusion in January that was far worse than originally reported; attackers gained access to nearly all of …Read More

Late Sunday night, on March 28, 2021, Nikita Popov, a core PHP committer, released a statement indicating that two malicious commits had been pushed to the php-src git repository. These commits were pushed to create a backdoor that would have effectively allowed attackers to achieve remote code execution through PHP and an HTTP header. Remote …Read More

Attackers continue to exploit recently patched vulnerabilities in Thrive Themes, though not all of them are successful. Two vulnerabilities are patched in the Facebook for WordPress plugin installed on over half a million sites. Google Chrome version 90 will use HTTPS by default, bringing significant improvements to speed and security. A ransomware insurance provider experiences …Read More

On December 22, 2020, our Threat Intelligence team responsibly disclosed a vulnerability in Facebook for WordPress, formerly known as Official Facebook Pixel, a WordPress plugin installed on over 500,000 sites. This flaw made it possible for unauthenticated attackers with access to a site’s secret salts and keys to achieve remote code execution through a deserialization …Read More

On March 23, 2021, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence Team discovered two recently patched vulnerabilities being actively exploited in Thrive Theme’s “Legacy” Themes and Thrive Theme plugins that were chained together to allow unauthenticated attackers to upload arbitrary files on vulnerable WordPress sites. We estimate that more than 100,000 WordPress sites are using Thrive Theme products …Read More

An attack shows how a SMS enablement service was used to bypass SMS 2FA for $16. We discuss the recently patched vulnerabilities in Elementor affecting over 7 million WordPress sites and how easily these cross-site scripting vulnerabilities can be exploited. We also talk about the SQL Injection vulnerabilities in Tutor LMS. The data center fire …Read More

On February 23, 2021, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team responsibly disclosed a set of stored Cross-Site Scripting vulnerabilities in Elementor, a WordPress plugin which “is now actively installed and used on more than 7M websites” according to a recent announcement on the Elementor blog. These vulnerabilities allowed any user able to access the Elementor editor, …Read More

On December 15, 2020, our Threat Intelligence team responsibly disclosed several vulnerabilities in Tutor LMS, a WordPress plugin installed on over 20,000 sites. The first five flaws made it possible for authenticated attackers to inject and execute arbitrary SQL statements on WordPress sites. This made it possible for attackers to obtain information stored in a …Read More

A data breach exposes 150,000 security cameras used by organizations around the world, including Tesla and Cloudflare. State-sponsored hacking groups exploit Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities. A fire in a French data center belonging to hosting company OVH affects millions of websites, including some prominent WordPress services like Imagify and WP Rocket. WordPress 5.7 was released this …Read More

UPDATE 2: As of late March 9th, 2021, the vulnerabilities have been fully patched in version 4.1.7. We highly recommend updating to this version immediately to keep your sites secure.  Special thanks to the plugin developers for working as quickly as possible to resolve these issues.  UPDATE 1: As of March 9th, 2021, the vulnerability …Read More