WordPress Bricks Theme Under Active Attack: Critical Flaw Impacts 25,000+ Sites

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&

Case Study: The Cookie Privacy Monster in Big Global Retail

Explore how an advanced exposure management solution saved a major retail industry client from ending up on the naughty step due to a misconfiguration in its cookie management policy. This wasn’t anything malicious, but with modern web environments being so complex, mistakes can happen, and non-compliance fines can be just an oversight away.Download the full case study here. As a child,

Balada Injector Infects Over 7,100 WordPress Sites Using Plugin Vulnerability

Thousands of WordPress sites using a vulnerable version of the Popup Builder plugin have been compromised with a malware called Balada Injector. First documented by Doctor Web in January 2023, the campaign takes place in a series of periodic attack waves, weaponizing security flaws WordPress plugins to inject backdoor designed to redirect visitors of infected sites to bogus tech

Product Explained: Memcyco's Real-Time Defense Against Website Spoofing

Hands-On Review: Memcyco’s Threat Intelligence Solution Website impersonation, also known as brandjacking or website spoofing, has emerged as a significant threat to online businesses. Malicious actors clone legitimate websites to trick customers, leading to financial scams and data theft causing reputation damage and financial losses for both organizations and customers. The Growing Threat of

WordPress Releases Update 6.4.2 to Address Critical Remote Attack Vulnerability

WordPress has released version 6.4.2 with a patch for a critical security flaw that could be exploited by threat actors by combining it with another bug to execute arbitrary PHP code on vulnerable sites. "A remote code execution vulnerability that is not directly exploitable in core; however, the security team feels that there is a potential for high severity when combined with some plugins,

Cybercriminals Exploiting WooCommerce Payments Plugin Flaw to Hijack Websites

Threat actors are actively exploiting a recently disclosed critical security flaw in the WooCommerce Payments WordPress plugin as part of a massive targeted campaign. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2023-28121 (CVSS score: 9.8), is a case of authentication bypass that enables unauthenticated attackers to impersonate arbitrary users and perform some actions as the impersonated user, including an

Surviving the 800 Gbps Storm: Gain Insights from Gcore's 2023 DDoS Attack Statistics

Gcore Radar is a quarterly report prepared by Gcore that provides insights into the current state of the DDoS protection market and cybersecurity trends. This report offers you an understanding of the evolving threat landscape and highlights the measures required to protect against attacks effectively. It serves as an insight for businesses and individuals seeking to stay informed about the

Improve Your Security WordPress Spam Protection With CleanTalk Anti-Spam

Every website owner or webmaster grapples with the issue of spam on their website forms. The volume of spam can be so overwhelming that finding useful information within it becomes quite challenging. What exacerbates this issue is that spam can populate your public pages, appearing in comments and reviews. You likely understand how this can damage your website's reputation, affect search results

Hackers Exploiting Unpatched WordPress Plugin Flaw to Create Secret Admin Accounts

As many as 200,000 WordPress websites are at risk of ongoing attacks exploiting a critical unpatched security vulnerability in the Ultimate Member plugin. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2023-3460 (CVSS score: 9.8), impacts all versions of the Ultimate Member plugin, including the latest version (2.6.6) that was released on June 29, 2023. Ultimate Member is a popular plugin that facilitates the

Critical Security Flaw in Social Login Plugin for WordPress Exposes Users' Accounts

A critical security flaw has been disclosed in miniOrange's Social Login and Register plugin for WordPress that could enable a malicious actor to log in as any user-provided information about email address is already known. Tracked as CVE-2023-2982 (CVSS score: 9.8), the authentication bypass flaw impacts all versions of the plugin, including and prior to 7.6.4. It was addressed on June 14, 2023

Magento, WooCommerce, WordPress, and Shopify Exploited in Web Skimmer Attack

Cybersecurity researchers have unearthed a new ongoing Magecart-style web skimmer campaign that's designed to steal personally identifiable information (PII) and credit card data from e-commerce websites. A noteworthy aspect that sets it apart from other Magecart campaigns is that the hijacked sites further serve as "makeshift" command-and-control (C2) servers, using the cover to facilitate the

Lack of Visibility: The Challenge of Protecting Websites from Third-Party Scripts

Third-party apps such as Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, HotJar, and JQuery have become critical tools for businesses to optimize their website performance and services for a global audience. However, as their importance has grown, so has the threat of cyber incidents involving unmanaged third-party apps and open-source tools. Online businesses increasingly struggle to maintain complete visibility

Attention Online Shoppers: Don't Be Fooled by Their Sleek, Modern Looks — It's Magecart!

An ongoing Magecart campaign has attracted the attention of cybersecurity researchers for leveraging realistic-looking fake payment screens to capture sensitive data entered by unsuspecting users. "The threat actor used original logos from the compromised store and customized a web element known as a modal to perfectly hijack the checkout page," Jérôme Segura, director of threat intelligence at

Many Public Salesforce Sites are Leaking Private Data

A shocking number of organizations — including banks and healthcare providers — are leaking private and sensitive information from their public Salesforce Community websites, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The data exposures all stem from a misconfiguration in Salesforce Community that allows an unauthenticated user to access records that should only be available after logging in.

Salesforce Community is a widely-used cloud-based software product that makes it easy for organizations to quickly create websites. Customers can access a Salesforce Community website in two ways: Authenticated access (requiring login), and guest user access (no login required). The guest access feature allows unauthenticated users to view specific content and resources without needing to log in.

However, sometimes Salesforce administrators mistakenly grant guest users access to internal resources, which can cause unauthorized users to access an organization’s private information and lead to potential data leaks.

Until being contacted by this reporter on Monday, the state of Vermont had at least five separate Salesforce Community sites that allowed guest access to sensitive data, including a Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program that exposed the applicant’s full name, Social Security number, address, phone number, email, and bank account number.

Vermont’s Chief Information Security Officer Scott Carbee said his security teams have been conducting a full review of their Salesforce Community sites, and already found one additional Salesforce site operated by the state that was also misconfigured to allow guest access to sensitive information.

“My team is frustrated by the permissive nature of the platform,” Carbee said.

Carbee said the vulnerable sites were all created rapidly in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, and were not subjected to their normal security review process.

“During the pandemic, we were largely standing up tons of applications, and let’s just say a lot of them didn’t have the full benefit of our dev/ops process,” Carbee said. “In our case, we didn’t have any native Salesforce developers when we had to suddenly stand up all these sites.”

Earlier this week, KrebsOnSecurity notified Columbus, Ohio-based Huntington Bank that its recently acquired TCF Bank had a Salesforce Community website that was leaking documents related to commercial loans. The data fields in those loan applications included name, address, full Social Security number, title, federal ID, IP address, average monthly payroll, and loan amount.

Huntington Bank has disabled the leaky TCF Bank Salesforce website. Matthew Jennings, deputy chief information security officer at Huntington, said the company was still investigating how the misconfiguration occurred, how long it lasted, and how many records may have been exposed.

KrebsOnSecurity learned of the leaks from security researcher Charan Akiri, who said he wrote a program that identified hundreds of other organizations running misconfigured Salesforce pages. But Akiri said he’s been wary of probing too far, and has had difficulty getting responses from most of the organizations he has notified to date.

“In January and February 2023, I contacted government organizations and several companies, but I did not receive any response from these organizations,” Akiri said. “To address the issue further, I reached out to several CISOs on LinkedIn and Twitter. As a result, five companies eventually fixed the problem. Unfortunately, I did not receive any responses from government organizations.”

The problem Akiri has been trying to raise awareness about came to the fore in August 2021, when security researcher Aaron Costello published a blog post explaining how misconfigurations in Salesforce Community sites could be exploited to reveal sensitive data (Costello subsequently published a follow-up post detailing how to lock down Salesforce Community sites).

On Monday, KrebsOnSecurity used Akiri’s findings to notify Washington D.C. city administrators that at least five different public DC Health websites were leaking sensitive information. One DC Health Salesforce Community website designed for health professionals seeking to renew licenses with the city leaked documents that included the applicant’s full name, address, Social Security number, date of birth, license number and expiration, and more.

Akiri said he notified the Washington D.C. government in February about his findings, but received no response. Reached by KrebsOnSecurity, interim Chief Information Security Officer Mike Rupert initially said the District had hired a third party to investigate, and that the third party confirmed the District’s IT systems were not vulnerable to data loss from the reported Salesforce configuration issue.

But after being presented with a document including the Social Security number of a health professional in D.C. that was downloaded in real-time from the DC Health public Salesforce website, Rupert acknowledged his team had overlooked some configuration settings.

Washington, D.C. health administrators are still smarting from a data breach earlier this year at the health insurance exchange DC Health Link, which exposed personal information for more than 56,000 users, including many members of Congress.

That data later wound up for sale on a top cybercrime forum. The Associated Press reports that the DC Health Link breach was likewise the result of human error, and said an investigation revealed the cause was a DC Health Link server that was “misconfigured to allow access to the reports on the server without proper authentication.”

Salesforce says the data exposures are not the result of a vulnerability inherent to the Salesforce platform, but they can occur when customers’ access control permissions are misconfigured.

“As previously communicated to all Experience Site and Sites customers, we recommend utilizing the Guest User Access Report Package to assist in reviewing access control permissions for unauthenticated users,” reads a Salesforce advisory from Sept. 2022. “Additionally, we suggest reviewing the following Help article, Best Practices and Considerations When Configuring the Guest User Profile.”

In a written statement, Salesforce said it is actively focused on data security for organizations with guest users, and that it continues to release “robust tools and guidance for our customers,” including:

Guest User Access Report 

Control Which Users Experience Cloud Site Users Can See

Best Practices and Considerations When Configuring the Guest User Profile

“We’ve also continued to update our Guest User security policies, beginning with our Spring ‘21 release with more to come in Summer ‘23,” the statement reads. “Lastly, we continue to proactively communicate with customers to help them understand the capabilities available to them, and how they can best secure their instance of Salesforce to meet their security, contractual, and regulatory obligations.”

Hackers Exploit Outdated WordPress Plugin to Backdoor Thousands of WordPress Sites

Threat actors have been observed leveraging a legitimate but outdated WordPress plugin to surreptitiously backdoor websites as part of an ongoing campaign, Sucuri revealed in a report published last week. The plugin in question is Eval PHP, released by a developer named flashpixx. It allows users to insert PHP code pages and posts of WordPress sites that's then executed every time the posts are

Over 1 Million WordPress Sites Infected by Balada Injector Malware Campaign

Over one million WordPress websites are estimated to have been infected by an ongoing campaign to deploy malware called Balada Injector since 2017. The massive campaign, per GoDaddy's Sucuri, "leverages all known and recently discovered theme and plugin vulnerabilities" to breach WordPress sites. The attacks are known to play out in waves once every few weeks. "This campaign is easily identified

Critical WooCommerce Payments Plugin Flaw Patched for 500,000+ WordPress Sites

Patches have been released for a critical security flaw impacting the WooCommerce Payments plugin for WordPress, which is installed on over 500,000 websites. The flaw, if left unresolved, could enable a bad actor to gain unauthorized admin access to impacted stores, the company said in an advisory on March 23, 2023. It impacts versions 4.8.0 through 5.6.1. Put differently, the issue could permit

Over 4,500 WordPress Sites Hacked to Redirect Visitors to Sketchy Ad Pages

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 

WordPress Security Alert: New Linux Malware Exploiting Over Two Dozen CMS Flaws

WordPress sites are being targeted by a previously unknown strain of Linux malware that exploits flaws in over two dozen plugins and themes to compromise vulnerable systems. "If sites use outdated versions of such add-ons, lacking crucial fixes, the targeted web pages are injected with malicious JavaScripts," Russian security vendor Doctor Web said in a report published last week. "As a result,

Trojanized Windows 10 Installer Used in Cyberattacks Against Ukrainian Government Entities

Government entities in Ukraine have been breached as part of a new campaign that leveraged trojanized versions of Windows 10 installer files to conduct post-exploitation activities. Mandiant, which discovered the "socially engineered supply chain" attack around mid-July 2022, said the malicious ISO files were distributed via Ukrainian- and Russian-language Torrent websites. It's tracking the

Researchers Detail New Attack Method to Bypass Popular Web Application Firewalls

A new attack method can be used to circumvent web application firewalls (WAFs) of various vendors and infiltrate systems, potentially enabling attackers to gain access to sensitive business and customer information. Web application firewalls are a key line of defense to help filter, monitor, and block HTTP(S) traffic to and from a web application, and safeguard against attacks such as cross-site

Over 280,000 WordPress Sites Attacked Using WPGateway Plugin Zero-Day Vulnerability

A zero-day flaw in the latest version of a WordPress premium plugin known as WPGateway is being actively exploited in the wild, potentially allowing malicious actors to completely take over affected sites. Tracked as CVE-2022-3180 (CVSS score: 9.8), the issue is being weaponized to add a malicious administrator user to sites running the WPGateway plugin, WordPress security company Wordfence

Hackers Exploit PrestaShop Zero-Day to Steal Payment Data from Online Stores

Malicious actors are exploiting a previously unknown security flaw in the open source PrestaShop e-commerce platform to inject malicious skimmer code designed to swipe sensitive information. "Attackers have found a way to use a security vulnerability to carry out arbitrary code execution in servers running PrestaShop websites," the company noted in an advisory published on July 22. PrestaShop is

Magecart Hacks Food Ordering Systems to Steal Payment Data from Over 300 Restaurants

Three restaurant ordering platforms MenuDrive, Harbortouch, and InTouchPOS were the target of two Magecart skimming campaigns that resulted in the compromise of at least 311 restaurants. The trio of breaches has led to the theft of more than 50,000 payment card records from these infected restaurants and posted for sale on the dark web. "The online ordering platforms MenuDrive and Harbortouch

Avoiding Death by a Thousand Scripts: Using Automated Content Security Policies

Businesses know they need to secure their client-side scripts. Content security policies (CSPs) are a great way to do that. But CSPs are cumbersome. One mistake and you have a potentially significant client-side security gap. Finding those gaps means long and tedious hours (or days) in manual code reviews through thousands of lines of script on your web applications. Automated content security

Newly Discovered Magecart Infrastructure Reveals the Scale of Ongoing Campaign

A newly discovered Magecart skimming campaign has its roots in a previous attack activity going all the way back to November 2021. To that end, it has come to light that two malware domains identified as hosting credit card skimmer code — "scanalytic[.]org" and "js.staticounter[.]net" — are part of a broader infrastructure used to carry out the intrusions, Malwarebytes said in a Tuesday analysis

Over a Million WordPress Sites Forcibly Updated to Patch a Critical Plugin Vulnerability

WordPress websites using a widely used plugin named Ninja Forms have been updated automatically to remediate a critical security vulnerability that's suspected of having been actively exploited in the wild. The issue, which relates to a case of code injection, is rated 9.8 out of 10 for severity and affects multiple versions starting from 3.0. It has been fixed in 3.0.34.2, 3.1.10, 3.2.28,

Researchers Uncover Malware Controlling Thousands of Sites in Parrot TDS Network

The Parrot traffic direction system (TDS) that came to light earlier this year has had a larger impact than previously thought, according to new research. Sucuri, which has been tracking the same campaign since February 2019 under the name "NDSW/NDSX," said that "the malware was one of the top infections" detected in 2021, accounting for more than 61,000 websites. Parrot TDS was documented in

Websites, Branded Email Remain Key to SMB Internet Services

Study Commissioned by Verisign Shows Websites Can Help Add Credibility and Drive New Business

Businesses today have many options for interacting with customers online. The findings of our independent survey of online consumers suggest that websites and branded email continue to be critical components of many businesses’ online presence, essential to supporting consumer confidence and enabling effective interaction with customers.

The quantitative study, commissioned by Verisign and conducted in December 2019 and January 2020 by 451 Research, now a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, surveyed 5,450 online consumers across key markets in North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia to help understand their sentiments on interacting with businesses online.

The survey was designed to arm service providers and registrars with an understanding of how the resources they provide to businesses can help create trust and deliver value to their customers.

Websites help add credibility

Among those surveyed, approximately two-thirds (66%) agreed that a business with its own website is more credible than one without. Likewise, a majority indicated that they would expect it to be more difficult to verify the identity of (56%), find online (55%) and contact (54%) a business that does not have its own website.

Certainly, this doesn’t suggest that businesses should abandon other online channels, such as social media and search engine efforts, to focus on a website-only approach. Instead, 64% of respondents said that a business with many points of online presence is more credible than a business with few.

Still, the study suggests that other online resources should complement, rather than replace, a small business’s own website. Respondents identified a business’s own website as being one of the most popular online methods for learning about (69%) and conducting transactions with (57%) businesses. Further, 71% of respondents reported being more likely to recommend a business with a professional website.

Taken together, these findings suggest that a website can help add credibility and drive new business.

Branded email supports customer communications

Trust is central to the relationship between a business and customers. This may be particularly true for online transactions (95% of survey respondents said they actively make purchases online), which require consumers to trust not only that the business will deliver the product or service for which they have paid, but also that it will not misuse payment or personal information.

A branded email address may be able to help, as an overwhelming number of respondents (85%) agreed that a business with a branded email address is more credible than one that uses a free email account. Respondents were more likely to have used a business’s branded email address (67%), than the telephone (56%) or social media (40%), to communicate with a business during the prior 12 months.

Key takeaway

For a small business, failing to be perceived as credible online could mean lost business not just today, but also in the future. A website and branded email address can help businesses add credibility and more effectively engage with consumers online.

Service providers offer a variety of website-building tools, email hosting solutions, and domain name registration services that can help businesses – whether just starting or well-established – to have a website and use a branded email.

Detailed survey results are available in 451 Research’s Black & White Paper Websites, Branded Email Remain Key to SMB Internet Services.

---

Verisign is a global wholesale provider of some of the world’s most recognized top-level domains, including .com and .net. For website building tools and email hosting solutions, contact a registrar. You can find a registrar here.

The post Websites, Branded Email Remain Key to SMB Internet Services appeared first on Verisign Blog.