On June 26, 2020, our Threat Intelligence team discovered a vulnerability in The Official Facebook Chat Plugin, a WordPress plugin installed on over 80,000 sites. This flaw made it possible for low-level authenticated attackers to connect their own Facebook Messenger account to any site running the vulnerable plugin and engage in chats with site visitors …Read More

On July 23, 2020, our Threat Intelligence team discovered a vulnerability present in two themes by Elegant Themes, Divi and Extra, as well as Divi Builder, a WordPress plugin. Combined, these products are installed on an estimated 700,000 sites. This flaw gave authenticated attackers, with contributor-level or above capabilities, the ability to upload arbitrary files, …Read More

On July 13, 2020, our Threat Intelligence team was alerted to a recently patched vulnerability in Newsletter, a WordPress plugin with over 300,000 installations. While investigating this vulnerability, we discovered two additional, more serious vulnerabilities, including a reflected Cross-Site Scripting(XSS) vulnerability and a PHP Object Injection vulnerability. We reached out to the plugin’s author on …Read More

In this week’s news, our Threat Intelligence team discovered a vulnerability in the wpDiscuz plugin, affecting over 80,000 WordPress sites. A blind SQL injection attack affected analytics service Waydev, exposing OAuth tokens for GitHub repositories for software companies, leading to further breaches. A debate about problematic admin notices on the WordPress admin dashboard has many …Read More

On June 19th, our Threat Intelligence team discovered a vulnerability present in Comments – wpDiscuz, a WordPress plugin installed on over 80,000 sites. This flaw gave unauthenticated attackers the ability to upload arbitrary files, including PHP files, and achieve remote code execution on a vulnerable site’s server. We initially reached out to the plugin’s developer …Read More

On June 12, 2020, Wordfence Threat Intelligence discovered an unauthenticated stored Cross-Site Scripting(XSS) vulnerability in TC Custom JavaScript, a WordPress plugin with over 10,000 installations. Wordfence Premium customers received a new firewall rule to provide protection against attacks targeting this vulnerability the same day. Wordfence users still using the free version received this rule after …Read More

A number of high profile Twitter accounts including those of Elon Musk, Apple, Uber, Bill Gates, Joe Biden and others were compromised as a part of a coordinated bitcoin scam attack. The attack lasted a few hours and netted the attackers about $100,000 worth of bitcoin. We talk about how this attack could have possibly …Read More

On July 10, 2020, our Threat Intelligence team discovered a vulnerability in All In One SEO Pack, a WordPress plugin installed on over 2 million sites. This flaw allowed authenticated users with contributor level access or above the ability to inject malicious scripts that would be executed if a victim accessed the wp-admin panel’s ‘all …Read More

On June 15, 2020, our Threat Intelligence team was made aware of a number of access control vulnerabilities that had recently been disclosed in KingComposer, a WordPress plugin installed on over 100,000 sites. During our investigation of these vulnerabilities, we discovered an unpatched reflected Cross-Site Scripting(XSS) vulnerability. Wordfence Premium customers received a new firewall rule …Read More

On June 24, 2020, our Threat Intelligence team was made aware of a possible vulnerability in the Adning Advertising plugin, a premium plugin with over 8,000 customers. We eventually discovered 2 vulnerabilities, one of which was a critical vulnerability that allowed an unauthenticated attacker to upload arbitrary files, leading to Remote Code Execution(RCE), which could …Read More

At Wordfence, we take performance seriously on all levels. While speed is one way to measure performance, there are other metrics that are equally important. Over the past year, our Threat Intelligence team has improved our malware scan by leaps and bounds. We wanted to share some of the metrics we use and what they …Read More

This week, we look at some targeted phishing attacks that are bypassing Microsoft Outlook’s protective filters, and phishing campaigns using calendar invitations to target unsuspecting recipients. We also look at some successful bitcoin scams and a new record for a massive DDoS attack that targeted an AWS customer. Drupal pushes out some security fixes, and …Read More

Defiant, dba Wordfence, is now listed on the Privacy Shield certification list participating in both the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield frameworks. The purpose of these frameworks is to allow for the lawful transfer of personal data from the European Union and Switzerland to the United States. Two years ago when the General Data Protection …Read More

This week, we look at the WP 5.4.2 release and a ransomware bitcoin scam targeting site owners with a “You’ve Been Hacked” email. We also look at an FBI warning about online banking app malware, the Verizon data breach report and what is says about WordPress, and how some white hat hackers are becoming millionaires …Read More

WordPress Core version 5.4.2 has just been released. Since this release is marked as a combined security and bug fix update, we recommend updating as soon as possible. With that said, most of the security fixes themselves are for vulnerabilities that would require specific circumstances to exploit. All in all this release contains 6 security …Read More

Between May 29 and May 31, 2020, the Wordfence Firewall blocked over 130 million attacks intended to harvest database credentials from 1.3 million sites by downloading their configuration files. The peak of this attack campaign occurred on May 30, 2020. At this point, attacks from this campaign accounted for 75% of all attempted exploits of …Read More

A few weeks ago, our Threat Intelligence team discovered several vulnerabilities present in Page Builder: PageLayer – Drag and Drop website builder, a WordPress plugin actively installed on over 200,000 sites. The plugin is from the same creators as wpCentral, a plugin within which we recently discovered a privilege escalation vulnerability. One flaw allowed any …Read More

On May 6, our Threat Intelligence team was alerted to a zero-day vulnerability present in Elementor Pro, a WordPress plugin installed on approximately 1 million sites. That vulnerability was being exploited in conjunction with another vulnerability found in Ultimate Addons for Elementor, a WordPress plugin installed on approximately 110,000 sites. We immediately released a firewall …Read More

On this week’s Think Like a Hacker podcast, we cover an active attack campaign targeting WordPress sites and numerous plugin vulnerabilities. This active attack campaign has been ongoing and has outpaced all other attacks on WordPress vulnerabilities. Our threat intelligence team has been tracking this attacker for months now, and we’re seeing these attacks intensifying. …Read More

On April 21st, our Threat Intelligence team discovered a vulnerability in Site Kit by Google, a WordPress plugin installed on over 300,000 sites. This flaw allows any authenticated user, regardless of capability, to become a Google Search Console owner for any site running the Site Kit by Google plugin. We filed a security issue report …Read More

Starting April 28th, we saw a 30 times increase in cross site scripting attack volume, originating from a single attacker, and targeting over a million WordPress sites. We published research detailing the threat actor and attack volume increase on May 5th. By the time we published, the attack volume had dropped back down to baseline …Read More

On Monday, May 4, 2020, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team discovered two vulnerabilities present in Page Builder by SiteOrigin, a WordPress plugin actively installed on over 1,000,000 sites. Both of these flaws allow attackers to forge requests on behalf of a site administrator and execute malicious code in the administrator’s browser. The attacker needs to …Read More

On May 6, 2020, our Threat Intelligence team received reports of active exploitation of vulnerabilities in two related plugins, Elementor Pro and Ultimate Addons for Elementor. We have reviewed the log files of compromised sites to confirm this activity. As this is an active attack, we wanted to alert you so that you can take …Read More

This is a public service announcement (PSA) from the Wordfence team regarding a security issue which may impact some of our customers. On May 4, 2020, GoDaddy, one of the world’s largest website hosting providers, disclosed that the SSH credentials of approximately 28,000 GoDaddy hosting accounts were compromised by an unauthorized attacker. SSH, while extremely …Read More

Our Threat Intelligence Team has been tracking a sudden uptick in attacks targeting Cross-Site Scripting(XSS) vulnerabilities that began on April 28, 2020 and increased over the next few days to approximately 30 times the normal volume we see in our attack data. The majority of these attacks appear to be caused by a single threat …Read More

The Wordfence Threat Intelligence team unpacked the security updates in WordPress 5.4.1, and they published quite a few blog posts about vulnerabilities in popular plugins like Ninja Forms, LearnPress, and the Real-Time Find and Replace plugin. These plugin vulnerabilities affected over one million WordPress sites. As a few of these were Cross Site Request Forgery …Read More

WordPress Core version 5.4.1 has just been released. Since this release is marked as a combined security and bug fix update, we recommend updating as soon as possible. With that said, most of the security fixes themselves are for vulnerabilities that appear to require specific circumstances to exploit. All in all this release contains 7 …Read More

On April 27, 2020, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team discovered a Cross-Site Request Forgery(CSRF) vulnerability in Ninja Forms, a WordPress plugin with over 1 million installations. This vulnerability could allow an attacker to trick an administrator into importing a contact form containing malicious JavaScript and replace any existing contact form with the malicious version. We …Read More

On March 16, 2020, LearnPress – WordPress LMS Plugin, a WordPress plugin with over 80,000 installations, patched a high-severity vulnerability that allowed subscriber-level users to elevate their permissions to those of an “LP Instructor”, a custom role with capabilities similar to the WordPress “author” role, including the ability to upload files and create posts containing …Read More

On April 22, 2020, our Threat Intelligence team discovered a vulnerability in Real-Time Find and Replace, a WordPress plugin installed on over 100,000 sites. This flaw could allow any user to inject malicious Javascript anywhere on a site if they could trick a site’s administrator into performing an action, like clicking on a link in …Read More