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.
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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).
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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.
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A few days ago, I blogged about the hacker attack that used the BlackHole toolkit and injected “createRSS” and “defs_colors” malicious scripts into legitimate websites. I’ve worked with a few webmasters of infected sites since then and now have some important additional information that I want to share here.
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The osCommerce .htaccess hack that I wrote about here and here is still quite prevalent.
Some webmasters have problems locating the rogue .htaccess files so I decided to address this issue again.
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This is the time of the year when online sellers do their best to attract herds of holiday shoppers. Software pirates are no different. They offer huge discounts (up to 95%) for popular and expensive software products and provide user-friendly online stores. They even made their sites one step closer to you!
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Selected short messages and links you might have missed if you don’t follow me on Twitter.
RackSpace WordPress issue, WordPress 3.0, keyloggers + pastebin »»
Back in November, I wrote about rogue blogs created in subdirectories of legitimate websites. The blogs poisoned Google search results for millions of relatively unpopular keywords (the long tail) redirecting visitors to scareware websites. This hack mainly affected sites hosted on Servage network.
Recently I’ve been contacted by one of Servage clients who found his sites hacked:
I noticed the anomalous traffic to domains that are essentially either completely parked or just used for email addresses (SMTP forwarding rather than anything ‘clever’ with webmail.) That led me to the file structures and a quick google led me to your site.
He sent me the offending files he found under his account (thanks Matthew). Now I can share my analysis of the files with you.
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