/tmp/wp_inc or Not Your Typical WordPress Attack
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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Ciscotred .cz .cc – Joomla Hack
During the last few days I’ve noticed an increased number of websites that redirect search traffic to ciscotred .cz .cc. The typical Unmask Parasites report looks like this:
Hacked WordPress Blogs Poison Google Images
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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Tweet Week: July 4-10, 2011
Selected short messages and links you might have missed if you don’t follow me on Twitter.
Google Image Poisoning. What’s New in June?
This is the second (more techie) part in the series of posts about a new wave of the Google Image poisoning attack. This part will heavily refer to the detailed description of the attack that I made back in May. Most of the aspects are still true so I will only talk about changes here. If you want to have a complete picture, I suggest that you read the original description first.
Changed doorway behavior
After May 18th, I noticed that doorway pages no longer redirected me anywhere when I clicked on poisoned search results. Neither to bad sites nor to home pages of compromised sites. Instead they displayed the spammy content generated for search engine crawlers only.
That was strange. That could never happen if the old algorithm was still in use.
Then I checked the cache directories (./.log/compromiseddomain.com/) and found new maintenance files there: don.txt and xml.txt. The don.txt file contained HTML template of spammy pages and was a replacement for the shab100500.txt file used by the original algorithm. The xml.txt contained the following string: bG92ZS1ibG9nY29tLm5ldA==, which decoded (base64) to “love-blogcom.net“. It was clear it was a more secure replacement for xmlrpc.txt that stored the domain name of a remote malicious server in plain text.
A few days later, the xml.txt files was replaced by xml.cgi, which was a clever step since .cgi files produce server errors when you try to open them in directories that aren’t configured to execute CGI scripts.
So I knew that the doorway script was updated, but I couldn’t understand why the doorways exhibited no malicious behavior when I clicked on hijacked image search results. That didn’t make much sense. What was the purpose of showing those spammy unintelligible pages without trying to monetize the traffic? The only plausible idea was they were playing the “long game” and needed some time to have the new pages rank well without risks of being identified as cloaked or malicious content, and when many pages reach prominent positions in search results they’ll start redirect web searchers to bad sites. Well, that was a working hypothesis until I got the source code of the new doorway script. The reality is crooks don’t want to play “long games” if they can monetize right away – the new doorway pages did redirect to bad site but my virtual environment wasn’t properly configured to trigger the redirects.
Continue – Dissecting the updated Google Image poisoning attack »»
Two Tweet Weeks: June 13-26, 2011
Selected short messages and links you might have missed if you don’t follow me on Twitter.
Thousands of Hacked Sites Seriously Poison Google Image Search Results
This investigation began a few weeks ago, when I came across the following two threads in website security forums:
[badwarebusters.org] Lately I have been seeing a huge increase in the number of hacked sites appearing on google image search results that redirect to a fake Av scanner. more »»
[Google Webmaster Help] google image search results often has multiple infected / malware sites on the first SERP page. more »»
This is a well known problem. I blogged about such SEO poisoning attacks several times here. This time I decided to check what’s behind the reported increase in malicious image search results.
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Update on redef_colors/createCSS attack: PHP code, Backdoors and osCommerce.
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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About this blog
Occasional posts from the developer of
Unmask Parasites about things that hackers already know and site owners should know (if they don't want to be victims).
Exploit reviews, security tips, and all that jazz.
