Wordfence Research and News

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Category: Threat Research
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Massive Targeted Exploit Campaign Against WooCommerce Payments Underway

The Wordfence Threat Intelligence team has been monitoring an ongoing exploit campaign targeting a recently disclosed vulnerability in WooCommerce Payments, a plugin installed on over 600,000 sites. Large-scale attacks against the vulnerability, assigned CVE-2023-28121, began on Thursday, July 14, 2023 and continued over the weekend, peaking at 1.3 million attacks against 157,000 sites on Saturday, …
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Wordfence Firewall Blocks Bizarre Large-Scale XSS Campaign

The Wordfence Threat Intelligence team has been monitoring an increase in attacks targeting a Cross-Site Scripting vulnerability in Beautiful Cookie Consent Banner, a WordPress plugin installed on over 40,000 sites. The vulnerability, which was fully patched in January in version 2.10.2, offers unauthenticated attackers the ability to add malicious JavaScript to a website, potentially allowing …
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The Wordfence 2022 State of WordPress Security Report

Today, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team is releasing our 2022 State of WordPress Security Report as a free White Paper. In our report, we look at changes in the threat landscape, analyze impactful trends, and provide recommendations based on our findings. While most of our recommendations remain consistent with prior years, there were some surprising …
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PSA: YITH WooCommerce Gift Cards Premium Plugin Exploited in the Wild

The Wordfence Threat Intelligence team has been tracking exploits targeting a Critical Severity Arbitrary File Upload vulnerability in YITH WooCommerce Gift Cards Premium, a plugin with over 50,000 installations according to the vendor. The vulnerability, reported by security researcher Dave Jong and publicly disclosed on November 22, 2022, impacts plugin versions up to and including …
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How Much is Your Hacked Site Worth?

The Wordfence Threat Intelligence team has recently concluded an investigation of online marketplaces, colloquially known as “shops” by threat actors, selling access to compromised services. While contemporary threat actors primarily coordinate and conduct business through Telegram channels, compromised services and accounts are effectively a commodity, and access to them has become fundamental to the operation …
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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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What Does The Fox Hack? Breaking Down the Anonymous Fox F-Automatical Script

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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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 Threat Activity

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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Threat Advisory: CVE-2022-40684

Threat Advisory: CVE-2022-40684 Fortinet Appliance Auth bypass

This morning, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team began tracking exploit attempts targeting CVE-2022-40684 on our network of over 4 million protected websites. CVE-2022-40684 is a critical authentication bypass vulnerability in the administrative interface of Fortinet’s FortiGate firewalls, FortiProxy web proxies, and FortiSwitch Manager, and is being actively exploited in the wild¹,². At the time of …
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