WordPress 6.2.2 is now available!
Posts Tagged security
WordPress 6.2.1 is now available! This minor release features 20 bug fixes in Core and 10 bug fixes for the block editor. You can review a summary of the maintenance updates in this release by reading the Release Candidate announcement. This release also features several security fixes. Because this is a security release, it is […]
The hijacking of YouTube accounts to promote bogus cryptocurrency schemes is nothing new. At Netcraft, we’ve previously blogged about the scale of cryptocurrency scams, and we saw attacks on at least 2,000 distinct IP addresses every month in the past year. Cryptocurrency-themed attacks remain popular with cybercriminals, but yesterday we had the opportunity to observe the recent high-profile attack on LinusTechTips as it unfolded.
This blog post explains what we saw, and how we protected our users from the scam sites hours before the compromised channels were taken down. All times in this post are GMT.
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), once the go-to financial institution for early-stage technology businesses and startups, is being exploited by cybercriminals. In this blog post, we discuss some of the tactics and techniques Netcraft has already detected criminals using to exploit SVB’s collapse – either directly or indirectly – as a lure.
As the flurry of COVID-themed attacks proved, cybercriminals waste no time in exploiting the attention such stories generate. Criminals often exploit current news stories, or specific times of year (like tax reporting) to make their scam seem more relevant to victims. They’ll also use the fear of missing out, hoping to trick victims into responding quickly.
New SVB-themed websites abound – criminal and otherwise
Since news of SVB’s collapse was announced, Netcraft has detected and blocked several SVB-related attacks in our malicious site feeds:

One of the websites pretending to be a USDC Reward Program
The pressure to update applications due to ever-faster successive updates tempts many a user to become careless and quickly click on an “Update” button. Often this works well, but sometimes unfortunately not. One wrong click – and the website is down or e-mails are lost forever. Therefore it is advisable to always have an up-to-date backup. But who thinks about regular backups? Fortunately, Plesk makes it easy, because every Plesk comes with a built-in backup manager that allows you to create backups manually or automatically on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis. Once set up, for example, weekly full…
The post You Are Always Safe When You Have an Up-To-Date Plesk Backup appeared first on Plesk.
Ready-to-go phishing kits make it quick and easy for novice criminals to deploy new phishing sites and receive stolen credentials.
Phishing kits are typically ZIP files containing web pages, PHP scripts and images that convincingly impersonate genuine websites. Coupled with simple configuration files that make it easy to choose where stolen credentials are sent, criminals can upload and install a phishing site with relatively little technical knowledge. In most cases, the credentials stolen by these phishing sites are automatically emailed directly to the criminals who deploy the kits.
However, the criminals who originally authored these kits often include extra code that surreptitiously emails a copy of the stolen credentials to them. This allows a kit’s author to receive huge amounts of stolen credentials while other criminals are effectively deploying the kit on their behalf. This undesirable functionality is often hidden by obfuscating the kit’s source code, or by cleverly disguising the nefarious code to look benign. Some kits even hide code inside image files, where it is very unlikely to be noticed by any of the criminals who deploy the kits.
Netcraft has analysed thousands of phishing kits in detail and identified the most common techniques phishing kit authors use to ensure that they also receive a copy of any stolen credentials via email.
The Motivation Behind Creating Deceptive Phishing Kits
When a phishing kit is deployed, the resultant phishing site will convincingly impersonate a financial institution or other target in order to coax victims into submitting passwords, credit card numbers, addresses, or other credentials. These details will occasionally be logged on the server, but more often than not, are emailed directly to the criminals who install these phishing kits.

Directory structure of an Amazon phishing kit contained in a ZIP file archive.
WordPress 6.0.3 is now available! This release features several security fixes. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. All versions since WordPress 3.7 have also been updated. WordPress 6.0.3 is a short-cycle release. The next major release will be version 6.1 planned for November 1, 2022. If […]
As of December 1, 2022 the WordPress Security Team will no longer provide security updates for WordPress versions 3.7 through 4.0. These versions of WordPress were first released eight or more years ago so the vast majority of WordPress installations run a more recent version of WordPress. The chances this will affect your site, or […]
Cloudflare is a Content Delivery Network (CDN), but it’s also a firewall and a performance layer for websites. It offers a multitude of features and enhancements (available at extra cost) and developers think it’s great, so let’s explore what they like so much about this service. Asset caching Caching your non-dynamic assets after they’ve first been requested will reduce the load on your server, one of the benefits that Cloudflare brings. It will also help to cut the amount of bandwidth being eaten up. This is a big deal because without Cloudflare, for every image on a page that’s requested…
The post What is Cloudflare and How To Set It Up For Your Site? appeared first on Plesk.
WordPress 5.9.2 is now available! This security and maintenance release features 1 bug fix in addition to 3 security fixes. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. All versions since WordPress 3.7 have also been updated. WordPress 5.9.2 is a security and maintenance release. The next major release […]
Netcraft’s most recent Web Server Survey includes nearly 1.2 billion websites. Most of these sites return a server banner that shows which web server software they use, thus allowing us to determine the market shares of each server vendor since 1995.
Many of these server banners are simply short strings like “Apache
”, while others may include additional details that reveal which other software – and which versions – are installed on the server. One such example is “Apache/2.2.32 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.32 OpenSSL/1.0.2k-fips DAV/2 PHP/5.5.38
”.

Chrome’s Network Inspector showing the HTTP response headers for wordpress.com, which uses the nginx web server. It does not reveal a version number.
A web server reveals its server banner via the Server HTTP response header. This string is not ordinarily exposed to users, but most browsers allow it to be viewed in the Network Inspector panel.
Custom banners
Web server software usually allows its server banner to be modified. A common reason for changing the default value is to reduce the amount of information that would be revealed to an attacker.
For example, if a web server advertises itself as running a vulnerable version of Apache, such as “Apache/2.4.49
” it could be more likely to come under attack than a server that reveals only “Apache
”.
Our Web Server Survey includes a few websites that return the following Server
header, which takes a deliberate swipe at the effectiveness of hiding this sort of information:
Server: REMOVED FOR PCI SCAN COMPLIANCE - SECURITY THROUGH OBSCURITY WORKS, RIGHT? - https://bit.ly/2nzfRrt
Of course, with this amount of flexibility, a cheeky or malicious administrator can configure a web server to pretend to be anything they want. Sometimes this is done in a deliberate attempt to cloak the truth or to mislead, while in others it may simply be done as a joke waiting to be found by anyone curious enough to look for the banner.
Unlikely server banners
Amongst the 1.2 billion websites, there are plenty of examples of unlikely server banners.

Examples of bank-themed survey scams seen by Netcraft
Netcraft has seen a large increase in survey scams impersonating well-known banks as a lure. These are often run under the guise of a prize in celebration of the bank’s anniversary, though in some cases a reward is promised just for participating.
These scams first came to Netcraft’s attention around 16 months ago, when businesses that were particularly useful during lockdown such as supermarkets, mobile phone networks, and delivery companies were targeted. The expansion of these attacks to use banks as a lure started in October 2021. To date we have seen over 75 distinct banks used as lures for these survey scams, with a global spread including banks from US, UK, Asia, and the Middle East.
This security release features four security fixes. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. All versions since WordPress 3.7 have also been updated. WordPress 5.8.3 is a short-cycle security release. The next major release will be version 5.9, which is already in the Release Candidate stage. You […]
Podcast | A Look Back at eCommerce in 2021, and What to Look For in 2022
We’ve reached the end of 2021, and it seems like just yesterday we were talking about omni-channel marketing and the massive evolutions that eCommerce saw in 2020. But now it’s time to recap what we’ve learned on Season 2 of Next Level Ops, as well as look towards what’s in store for 2022. To help us do that, we have Brian Richards, founder of WPSessions and organizer of WooSesh, the only WooCommerce-focused event. Brian has developed eCommerce sites, has been teaching WordPress for nearly 10 years, and now focuses on running WordPress and WooCommerce events. As a result, he has…
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On Friday, December 10, 2021, a vulnerability for Log4j was announced in CVE-2021-44228. Log4j is developed by the Apache Foundation and is widely used by both enterprise apps and cloud services. It was reported by Alibaba Cloud’s security team to Apache on November 24. They also revealed that CVE-2021-44228 impacts default configurations of multiple Apache frameworks, including Apache Struts2, Apache Solr, Apache Druid, Apache Flink, and others. The United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security …
The post The Apache Log4j exploit and how to protect your cPanel server first appeared on cPanel Blog.
Plesk WordPress Toolkit 5.8 Release: Site Vulnerability Scan, Autodetection WordPress Login URL, and More
The Plesk WordPress Toolkit 5.8 is now available. This release comes with the biggest game charger feature of the year – the Site Vulnerability Scan. Let’s have a look at why we’re so excited about this feature going forward: Site Vulnerability Scan WordPress Toolkit can now regularly scans active plugins, themes, and WordPress versions to identify known vulnerabilities, using information provided by our friendly partners at Patchstack. Before we go further into the details of this feature, let’s quickly go through some numbers to understand how much of a game changer this really is: First of all, WordPress is used…
The post Plesk WordPress Toolkit 5.8 Release: Site Vulnerability Scan, Autodetection WordPress Login URL, and More appeared first on Plesk.
Netcraft recently confirmed that a Bangladesh Army site was hosting an Outlook Web Access (OWA) web shell. Additionally, an OWA web shell was found on the Department of Arts and Culture site for the South-African Kwazulu-Natal province and an Iraqi government site was found to be hosting a PHP shell. Web shells are a common tool used by attackers to maintain control of a compromised web server, providing a web interface from which arbitrary commands can be executed on the server hosting the shell. OWA provides remote access to Microsoft Exchange mailboxes; since the disclosure of the ProxyLogon vulnerabilities in March, Microsoft Exchange has become a popular target for cyberattacks.
Netcraft has to date identified nearly 10,000 websites used in the distribution of the FluBot family of Android malware. As detailed in our previous articles on FluBot, these sites are unwittingly hosting a PHP script that acts as a proxy to a further backend server, allowing otherwise legitimate sites to deliver Android malware to victims. When visited by the intended victim, a “lure” is displayed that implores them to download and install the FluBot malware.
The most common lure themes are parcel delivery and voicemail messages, where the user is told to install the malicious app to track a parcel or listen to a voicemail message. One particularly interesting lure took advantage of FluBot’s infamy, by offering a fake “Android security update” that claimed to protect against the malware family. Users installing this “security update” would instead be infected with FluBot.
Most sites distributing FluBot malware also host legitimate content, suggesting they were compromised by the operators of this malware distribution network, without the knowledge of the site operator. While the use of unrelated domains makes the lures less convincing, as compared to domains specifically registered for fraud, it allows the malware distribution network to operate at a much larger scale.
These affected sites all have one factor in common: they run self-hosted WordPress instances. Netcraft believes the operators of this malware distribution network are actively exploiting well-known vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins and themes to upload malicious content onto insecure sites, joining a growing list of threat actors doing the same.



A collection of lures used by the FluBot distribution network
WordPress 5.8.2 is now available! This security and maintenance release features 2 bug fixes in addition to 1 security fix. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. All versions since WordPress 5.2 have also been updated. WordPress 5.8.2 is a small focus security and maintenance release. The next […]
The Government of Eswatini’s website, www.gov.sz
, is running a
cryptojacker. Cryptojackers
use website visitors’ CPU power to mine cryptocurrency, most often without their knowledge or permission.
Data from archive.org suggests the JavaScript snippet was added to the site’s HTML source between
28th September and
6th October.

WebMinePool cryptojacker injection on www.gov[.]sz
.
While sites that are kept open for long periods of time are often the most lucrative – the longer
the victim’s browser tab is open, the more cryptocurrency can be mined — criminals are typically
not fussy when deploying cryptojackers. Criminals can target large swathes of sites at once, including
those using vulnerable or out-of-date software, compromised third-party JavaScript, or with easily guessable
administrator credentials.
Key Reasons Why You Should Upgrade Your Email Security Today – A Plesk Email Security Walkthrough
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The Netcraft Browser Extension now
offers credential leak detection for extra protection against
shopping site skimmers.
With brick-and-mortar shops around the world closed due to COVID-19, consumers turned to online businesses to fulfil their shopping needs. According to Adobe’s Digital Economy Index report, US online spending in June was $73 billion, up 76% from $42 billion last year. Even with restrictions lifted, research commissioned by Visa suggests that 74% of Britons who shopped online more often during the lockdown will continue to do so.
Now more than ever it is important to protect against JavaScript skimmers. These are snippets of malicious code which criminals upload to compromised shops. Unbeknownst to the store owner or the user, they transmit entered card details directly to the criminal. Unlike scams such as phishing, which can often be avoided by a vigilant internet user, skimmers are invisible to the human eye without a tool such as the Netcraft Extension to expose them.
Netcraft currently blocks over 6,000 shopping sites which contain skimmers, and even large companies such as British Airways, Ticketmaster and Puma have fallen prey to these attacks in the past.

The Netcraft Extension identifying and blocking a skimmer on an online shop
When you visit a shopping site, the Netcraft extension will
evaluate all requests made by the web page. If a request is found to
be sending credentials to a different domain, the extension
will block the request to prevent your data from being stolen. A block
screen will notify you about the request and provide
information about the malicious behaviour that was detected. Only
card number leaks are currently blocked, but other types of
credentials may be enabled in future updates.
For example, if you check out using your credit card on
exampleshoppingsite.com but your card details are sent to
examplebadsite.com, the extension will block the request. This
checking is done locally and securely in your browser – no sensitive
information is sent to Netcraft.
The extension will also block pages which make requests to
malicious domains that are part of JavaScript attacks.
In addition to shopping site skimmers, the Netcraft Extension also protects against other malicious JavaScript, phishing and fake shops, including those related to coronavirus. The extension is available for Chrome, Firefox, Opera and the new Microsoft Edge based on Chromium.
If you already have the Netcraft Extension installed, your browser
will update it automatically.
More than two thousand sites using Extended Validation certificates stopped working this weekend and remain inaccessible today (Monday), including those run by banks, governments, and online shops. The EV certificates used by these sites were revoked on Saturday, and have yet to be replaced. Most visitors using modern web browsers are completely locked out: this certificate error cannot be bypassed in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Microsoft Edge.
Chrome’s unbypassable revoked certificate interstitial on online.anz.com. ANZ is one of the"big four" Australian banks.
Last week, DigiCert disclosed a reporting discrepancy in its audit for EV certificates. As part of its response, DigiCert committed to revoking the certificates, which it intends to complete over the coming weeks. Only a subset of DigiCert’s EV certificates are affected: in the July SSL Server Survey, Netcraft found 17,200 EV certificates in active use on port 443 that are due to be revoked.
The first batch of revocations happened this weekend. While most of the certificates revoked on Saturday 11th July have been correctly replaced and reinstalled, many have not.
On Monday morning, Netcraft found 3,800 sites still using EV certificates issued by the affected sub-CAs. Of these 3,800, more than 2,300 were still using a revoked EV certificate, completely disabling the sites for users in modern browsers, which handle EV revocation more robustly than other types of certificate. The remainder are yet to be revoked.
Many organisations appear to have been caught unawares, continuing to use revoked EV certificates, including The State Bank of India, Rackspace, Authorize.net, ANZ Bank, and Telegram.

Authorize.net using a revoked EV certificate

The New Zealand government using a revoked EV certificate
Wirecard, the beleaguered German payment processor, briefly had its main site, www.wirecard.com, displaying a certificate warning early on Monday, but the certificate has since been replaced with a working non-EV certificate. There are still a number of Wirecard domains with revoked certificate warnings.
The current coronavirus pandemic has resulted in the closure of many pubs, restaurants, and brick-and-mortar retail stores. Many purchases that would previously have been made in person now take place online. In research commissioned by Visa
, 89% of Britons have shopped online since the UK’s lockdown restrictions began, with 31% buying items online for the first time during this period. This increase in online shopping activity benefits criminal groups in that: smaller businesses newly reliant on online transactions provide attackers with a stream of inadequately-defended shopping sites to exploit, and buyers are far more likely to be driven to these compromised shops or to fake shops compared to before the pandemic.
JavaScript skimmers run on compromised shopping sites. When shoppers enter their payment details, the skimmer secretly sends a copy to the attacker – potentially even if the customer does not complete the transaction. Even the most careful of users can be victims of these attacks, as they appear on compromised but otherwise well-intentioned shops with no visual indication of their presence.
Fake shops are another threat. Shoppers seeking bargains may unknowingly find themselves on a fake shop which claims to offers the products they want at a highly discounted price, but the victim will subsequently only receive counterfeit goods, no goods at all, or have the transaction aborted after entering credentials which is equivalent to a phishing attack.
Fake shops also take advantage of the pandemic by offering goods in high demand due to coronavirus, such as N95 masks. The FBI has released a Public Service Announcement about an increase in online shopping scams involving the sale of counterfeit healthcare products such as Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). To date, Netcraft has blocked over a thousand such coronavirus-themed fake shops, 80,000 other fake shops selling all sorts of counterfeit goods, and around 3,500 compromised shops hosting JavaScript skimmers.
The Netcraft browser extension and mobile apps provide protection against fake shops as well as legitimate shopping sites that have been compromised with JavaScript skimmers. When an extension or app user visits one of these dangerous shops, Netcraft will block access to the shop and alert them:

Visiting a fake shop without the Netcraft extension

Visiting a fake shop with the Netcraft extension
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Online shopping has surged since lockdown started in March. Many of us, looking to be healthier, have headed online for sports equipment and a number of sportswear retailers have reported booming online sales. John Lewis recorded a 72% increase in total sports shoe sales, while Adidas and Puma have both seen an increase in ecommerce revenue.
Shoppers browsing online for the best deals, however, need to take care, as many people would be surprised at the scale of fake shops. Each day we find new fake shops designed to entice shoppers away from bona fide outlets, as many brands have yet to find effective countermeasures.
Counterfeit shoes, clothing and other accessories are estimated to lose the industry more than €26 billion each year in the EU alone, while the loss due to all online counterfeiting is estimated at $323 billion a year. The OECD estimated that over 3% of all imports worldwide are counterfeit.
Traditionally fake shops claim to sell luxury consumer goods at highly discounted prices. We have seen fake shops using at least three different models:
- Payment is accepted, but no goods are delivered.
- At the end of the checkout process, an error message is displayed such as “Out of Stock” and no transaction occurs. This is equivalent to a phishing attack, as the fake shop has the consumer’s credentials.
- Payment is accepted, and goods are delivered. The quality of goods varies between junk and identical to the bona fide item.
Trainers are the most counterfeited goods
We are currently block around 75,000 fake shops in our extension and apps. Of these, roughly half target a specific brand, such as Nike or Adidas. About 70% of the fake shops selling branded goods sell shoes, predominantly trainers.
Corroborating this, European customs authorities handle more cases of counterfeit sports shoes than any other type of product.

Fake shops by type of goods sold
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WordPress 5.4.2 is now available! This security and maintenance release features 23 fixes and enhancements. Plus, it adds a number of security fixes—see the list below. These bugs affect WordPress versions 5.4.1 and earlier; version 5.4.2 fixes them, so you’ll want to upgrade. If you haven’t yet updated to 5.4, there are also updated versions […]
Next Level Ops Podcast: Must Haves for Managed WordPress Hosting with Andrey Kugaevskiy
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Next Level Ops Podcast: Tips for Keeping Your Server Secure with Igor Antipkin
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