This post will provide a very detailed and rather technical description of the latest massive WordPress hack. I find it interesting in many ways. Mainly because it’s so atypical.
If you don’t have time to read the whole article, you can head directly to the short description of the attack and then to the Summary section where I talk about what’s new, strange and uncommon in this attack. Or if you are a webmaster of a hacked blog, go to the “To Webmasters” section – it will help you resolve the problem.
Continue »»
Selected short messages and links you might have missed if you don’t follow me on Twitter.
TimThumb attacks, We Stop Badware Host program, blog scrapers, Apache DOS and workaround »»
When Michael VanDeMar mentioned the malicious “googlesafebrowsing .com” domain, I decided to check how exactly it was used in malware attacks. It’s quite a popular trick to mimic Google’s own domains to make malicious code look legitimate. I have a “collection” of several dozens on misspelled Google Analytics domains alone that were used for malware distribution. In this case, the domain name was made up rather than misspelled. It referres to Google’s Safe Browsing project and their diagnostic pages that actually use the google.com domain (as most other Google’s services).
Continue »»
I’d like to point webmasters at a great article on the Armorize blog. It is about a new massive script injection attack that seems to have affected a few thousand websites. In my post, I will summarize the information specifically for webmasters.
Continue »»
Selected short messages and links you might have missed if you don’t follow me on Twitter.
This is a follow up to my last week’s post about hacked WordPress blogs and poisoned Google Images search results. Cyber-criminals infiltrated 4,000+ self-hosted WP blogs and created doorway pages that would redirect visitors coming from Google Images search to scareware sites. A few days ago I posted a short update to let you know that Google has removed the doorway pages from its index. I also promised to share some new interesting details about that black hat SEO campaign. So here we go!
Continue »»
Selected short messages and links you might have missed if you don’t follow me on Twitter.
After a series of posts about Google Image poisoning campaigns that used hot-linked images a main trick to get top positions in search results, I’d like to describe a different Google Image poisoning attack that affects WordPress blogs and uses self-hosted images.
Continue »»
Selected short messages and links you might have missed if you don’t follow me on Twitter.
Google’s warning, G.CO, Python in WordPress!?, Joomla 1.7, follow up on the tattoo spam »»