Wordfence Research and News
Configuration Probing: Your Backups Might Be Your Greatest Weakness
Configuration files exist to make life easier for developers and website operators. In a world without configuration files, every instance of code that depended on a database connection could potentially require the connection details to be hard coded or manually entered. Other reusable data would be defined multiple times, causing code bloat and possible performance …
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Wordfence 7.8.0 Is Out! Here Is What Is Included
Wordfence 7.8.0 is out! A huge thanks to our quality assurance team, our team of developers and our ops team for planning, implementing and releasing Wordfence 7.8.0. This release has several fixes to make Wordfence even more robust, and includes a fundamental change in the way our signup works. Since our launch in 2012, the …
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Not Just for the Government: Using the NIST Framework to Secure WordPress
When setting up a WordPress website, it is easy to focus on the look and feel of the website, while overlooking the important aspect of security. This makes sense, because the security of a website is largely invisible until something goes wrong. Installing a cybersecurity plugin like Wordfence significantly reduces the chances of a successful …
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Russian Hacktivist Group Targets Political Websites with DDOS Attacks
A Russian hacktivist group calling itself “The People’s Cyberarmy” called on its members to target the American Democratic party website at https://democrats.org with DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks this morning, November 8th, 2022, which is Election Day in the United States. A post in their Telegram channel, “CyberArmyofRussia_Reborn”, which has more than 7,000 subscribers …
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Missing Authorization Vulnerability in Blog2Social Plugin
On October 5, 2022, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team responsibly disclosed a Missing Authorization vulnerability in Blog2Social, a WordPress plugin installed on over 70,000 sites that allows users to set up post sharing to various social networks. Vulnerable versions of the plugin make it possible for authenticated attackers with minimal permissions, such as subscribers, to …
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Wordfence Premium Price Increase Coming in December – The First Since 2016
It has been over 6 years since we last raised our prices. Since then our team has more than doubled in size and we have introduced significant improvements to the core Wordfence product, launched a range of free and paid products, and introduced new services that include 24 hour incident response. Starting December 5th, 2022, …
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What Does The Fox Hack? Breaking Down the Anonymous Fox F-Automatical Script
While performing routine security research, one of our threat analysts discovered the latest version of a Command and Control (C2) script, which is referred to as F-Automatical within the script’s code and was commonly known as FoxAuto in older versions. This is the seventh version of this automatic C2 script that is developed and distributed …
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Wordfence Intelligence Launches New Malware Hash Feed!
Today, the Wordfence team is launching a Malware Hash Feed as part of our Wordfence Intelligence API. This gives our Enterprise users another way to rapidly and definitively identify malware targeting web applications. As the world’s foremost WordPress security provider, Wordfence has an expertly curated database of nearly three and a half million unique malicious …
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Threat Advisory: Monitoring CVE-2022-42889 “Text4Shell” Exploit Attempts
On October 17, 2022, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team began monitoring for activity targeting CVE-2022-42889, or “Text4Shell” on our network of 4 million websites. We started seeing activity targeting this vulnerability on October 18, 2022. Text4Shell is a vulnerability in the Apache Commons Text library versions 1.5 through 1.9 that can be used to achieve …
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Two Weeks of Monitoring ProxyNotShell (CVE-2022-41040 & CVE-2022-41082) Threat Activity
The Wordfence Threat Intelligence team has been monitoring exploit attempts targeting two zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server tracked as CVE-2022-41040 and CVE-2022-41082, collectively known as ProxyNotShell. These vulnerabilities are actively being exploited in the wild. At the time of writing, we have observed 1,658,281 exploit attempts across our network of 4 million protected websites. …
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