Careless Webmasters as WordPress Hosting Providers for Spammers
Foks, a frequent contributer to my investigations, recently pointed me at an interesting black hat SEO campaign where thousands of hacked WordPress blogs and Joomla sites were used to create doorways promoting online stores selling various “slimming pills” and fake luxury goods.
During the last few years I saw many attacks where cyber criminals created large spammy sites in subdirectories of hacked legitimate sites. It’s an easy way to create millions of doorway pages on thousands of established domains with good reputation for free (owners of hacked sites pay for hosting, bandwidth and domains) — typical parasitic behavior. Webmasters normally only visit pages they created themselves and rarely check what happens in subdirectories so they may not notice spammy sections for months. Sometimes such sections may be significantly larger than legitimate sections of hacked websites and attract much more search traffic.
The back end of such rogue sections is usually some doorway generating script along with rewrite rules in .htaccess or a simple blogging engine like FlatPress that doesn’t require a database. The only requirement of such solutions is PHP so they will work on most websites.
However this time spammers chose WordPress as a back end for their doorways. After all, if they hack a WordPress blog, the server is guranteed to be compatible with WordPress and all they need to do to install a new instance is get MySQL password from existing wp-config.php and chose a different table prefix for their WordPress database.
Here’s how the attack works »»
Malware Piggybacks on Automatic WordPress Updates
Most WordPress bloggers know the “Always keep your WordPress blog up-to-date” mantra. To make upgrades painless, WordPress developers introduced the “Automatic Update” features in version 2.7. A blog admin only needs to visit the “Update WordPress” page (Tools -> Update) and click on the “Update Automatically” button. That’s it! Easy!
Sometimes I see how webmasters misinterpret the importance of upgrades for WordPress security. They expect that if they upgrade a hacked blog, it will immediately become clean and secure. Unfortunately it doesn’t work this way. Upgrades can only clean core WordPress files, leaving backdoors, infected themes, plugins and database records intact. That’s why it is important to clean up your site before the upgrade.
Moreover, a few days ago I came across a new massive infection (more than 1,000 currently known infected blogs) that hijacks the “Automatic Update” feature and makes it the event that triggers blog re-infection.
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Selected Tweets (Oct-Nov 2011)
Selected short messages and links you might have missed if you don’t follow me on Twitter.
It has been a while since the last Tweet Week. The main reason is I don’t tweet that often now to post my tweets every week and I don’t want to post old news here either.
So what happened? The answer is I can’t get used to Twitter web interface – it is so inconvenient. I had to use it when I had some strange problems with my Twitter client (twhirl). Thank’s god, I’ve finally made my twhirl work so I hope I will be able to tweet more often.
Anyway, here are some of the latest tweets.
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/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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Tweet Week: August 22-28, 2011
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 »»
Hackers target unpatched WooFramework
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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Two Tweet Weeks: August 8-21, 2011
Selected short messages and links you might have missed if you don’t follow me on Twitter.
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.
