Think Like A Hacker With Wordfence

An analysis of WordPress-related search trends found that interest in WooCommerce related results dominated during 2020. We discuss recent vulnerabilities discovered by our threat intelligence team in Ninja Forms, affecting over 1 million sites. WordPress issues a statement that pirated themes and plugins are prohibited on the repository. And a supply chain attack affects users of the once-legitimate Barcode Scanner Android app. We also discuss some career opportunities on the Wordfence team.

This week, the Wordfence team discusses cryptography in-depth, including the basics, a brief history, hashing, and the Crypto Wars. We also go over current news, including 2 new findings by the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team, a new milestone for WordPress, and a recent attack on a Florida Town's water supply.

Wordfence opens the K-12 site audit and site cleaning service for public schools worldwide. Machine learning is now a big part of our malware identification process, which will speed new malware signatures to deployment for WordPress sites protected by Wordfence. A bug in Sudo can let attackers with access to a local system to elevate their access to a root-level account, which has implications for WordPress sites, Mac users, and many Internet of Things devices. WordPress 5.7, the next major release, will make it much easier for users to migrate their sites from HTTP to HTTPS.

After a disruptive year in 2020, there are new challenges in 2021, but also immense opportunities in numerous fields. In a deep and wide-ranging conversation, Mark Maunder and Kathy Zant discuss artificial intelligence, whether or not we're living in simulation, cryptocurrencies and the opportunities of blockchain technology, open source communities and publishing, avoiding scams and FOMO, as well as what fields are most promising for the next 10 years. 

Wordfence announced a new program offering free site cleaning and site audits to public schools in the United States. We talk about why we're offering this program and how to help schools take advantage of it. We also talk about the growing prevalence of WordPress as a content management system and how the incoming administration is using WordPress. We also talk about an unpatched Windows 10 denial of service vulnerability, a breach affecting over 1.9 million Pixlr users, and phishing kits exposing stolen passwords via Google search.

The recent SolarWinds attack was incredibly sophisticated. What happens when that level of sophistication targets a homebuyer during one of the largest transactions of their lifetime? On this episode, we tell the story of an extremely difficult to detect spearphishing attack that almost cost a homebuyer a significant amount. From this story, we review the warning signs and steps you can take to protect against real estate wire transfer fraud. 

Earlier this week, we learned that SolarWinds, the largest provider of network management tools for large enterprise organizations fell victim to a supply chain attack. This attack affected their Orion network management system. Reportedly, 18,000 enterprise and government customers downloaded and installed malware that was digitally signed by a valid certificate as part of an update from SolarWinds’ own servers. Microsoft took control of one of the primary command-and-control domains. We also talk about a vulnerability in the PageLayer plugin and a wormable zero-click XSS bug found in the Jabber client.

WordPress 5.6 was released this week with a new feature called application passwords. In this episode we talk about how application passwords work, where to find them in your WordPress installation, and why Wordfence decided to turn these off by default in version 7.4.14. We also talk about a new Magecart attack that places card skimmers inside of CSS files, MailPoet joining WooCommerce and what this means for eCommerce on WordPress sites. FireEye, one of the largest security firms, reported they were hacked by a nation state APT group, and a wormable zero-click vulnerability was found in Microsoft Teams.

With WordPress 5.6’s imminent release and the recent release of PHP 8, we talk about the rapid changes affecting the future of WordPress with new security features and new functionality available to both WordPress users and developers. We also review a recent vulnerability found in iPhones and a social engineering attack on GoDaddy that targeted numerous cryptocurrency exchange sites.

Two hosting providers experienced outages this week. GoDaddy had a brief outage affecting numerous systems on Tuesday, November 17. Managed.com had an extensive outage due to ransomware that affected all systems. We discuss what types of incident response preparations site owners should consider when events beyond their control occur. We also discuss a large-scale attack targeting themes using the Epsilon Framework, the new head of security at Twitter, and an Android chat app exposing private messages.

Three critical privilege escalation vulnerabilities in the Ultimate Member plugin put over 100,000 sites at risk. We also talk about the Page Experience metric to be added as a ranking signal for Google search and what this means for WordPress sites using page builders or Gutenberg. Microsoft warns against using telephone/SMS-based multi-factor authentication, and two zero-day vulnerabilities were patched in Google Chrome. Windows patches over 111 vulnerabilities as a part of November's Patch Tuesday.

A hosting provider exposed over 63 million customer records via an open elastic search database containing verbose logs with plain-text username/password credentials for numerous WordPress, Magento and other sites. We also talk about the security updates in WordPress 5.5.2/5.5.3 and the accidental 5.5.3-alpha autoupdate. We talk about object injection vulnerabilities like the one discovered in the Welcart e-Commerce plugin and how POP chain attacks work. And Google's Project Zero finds a high-severity vulnerability in GitHub Actions not fixed within the 90-day disclosure grace period.

We cover a couple of breaking stories this week, including the emergency release of WordPress 5.5.3 on Friday, October 30. In preparation for this, a number of sites autoupdated to version 5.5.3-alpha. We also look at the the defacement of the Trump Campaign website, and how 2-Factor Authentication could have prevented this. We also look at the implications of a massive Nitro database impacting numerous large organizations. A botnet is targeting a number of content management systems, including WordPress sites. And AdWare found on the Google Play Store is targeting kids. 

An easily exploitable SQL injection vulnerability was discovered in the Loginizer plugin installed on over one million WordPress sites, causing the WordPress team to force an update to sites using the vulnerable version. The Justice department is filing antitrust suit against Google for allegedly monopolizing search and search advertising markets. Google Chrome gets an update to fix an actively exploited zero-day vulnerability. And a new feature in Jetpack allows users to post Tweetstorms through WordPress.

On this week's episode of Think Like a Hacker, we chat about the cross-site request forgery vulnerability found in the Child Theme Creator by Orbisius and how attackers could potentially use a vulnerability like this with spearphishing to wreak havoc, much like the phishing campaigns now being found on the Canva design platform. We also discuss the benefits of adding application passwords for REST API authentication planned for WordPress version 5.6. We also consider the ramifications of the critical, wormable RCE bug patched by Microsoft, and how attackers are actively attacking the recent zerologon vulnerability that was patched in August.

A vulnerability discovered by the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team in the WPBakery plugin exposes over 4 million sites. High severity vulnerabilities were discovered in the Post Grid and Team Showcase plugins. The online avatar service Gravatar, has been exposed to a user enumeration technique, which could be abused to collect data on its users' profiles, and a card skimmer was found on Boom! Mobile's web site, putting customer card data at risk.

Shopify reports that rogue employees stole data from 200 merchants on their platform. A security researcher found a vulnerability in the Medium Partner Program could have allowed an attacker to steal writers' earnings. Symantec reports that a state-sponsored hacking group has been hiding out in company networks as a part of an information-stealing campaign. And Twitter reports that an API bug exposed app keys and tokens via a caching issue.

Our Threat Intelligence team discovered several vulnerabilities present in XCloner Backup and Restore, a WordPress plugin installed on over 30,000 sites. These vulnerabilities could have allowed an attacker to modify arbitrary files, including PHP files. The US government Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is warning of detected persistent malicious activity traced back to LokiBot infections. An upcoming API change will break Facebook and Instagram oEmbed links across the web beginning October 24. Google has launched the Web Stories for WordPress plugin with a drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG interface for making full-screen, tappable content. Drupal patches a critical reflected XSS vulnerability. And a critical stored XSS vulnerability in Instagram's Spark AR Studio nets a 14-year-old researcher $25,000.

Vulnerabilities were recently patched in the Discount Rules for WooCommerce plugin installed on over 40,000 WordPress sites. Developers from OWASP Core Rule Set said ModSecurity v3 is exposed to denial of service exploits, though the maintainers of ModSecurity reject that claim. A severe vulnerability called Zerologon in Windows Netlogon was patched in August; this bug could be exploited to attack enterprise servers. And a security researcher also discovered that the Windows TCPIP Finger command can also function as a file downloader and a makeshift command and control server. Last weekend, nearly 2,000 Magento stores were compromised in the largest hacking campaign since 2015.

Millions of attacks have been targeting the recent File Manager plugin zero-day vulnerability discovered last week. Two attackers are vying for control over sites compromised through the vulnerability. A security researcher has revealed that specially crafted Windows 10 themes can be used to perform Pass-the-Hash attacks. A database belonging to the Digital Point webmaster forum leaked records of over 800,000 web professionals that are members of the forum. Visa is warning of a new Baka Javascript credit card skimmer that removes itself from memory after exfiltrating stolen data, making it difficult to detect.