Possible exploit

  • Resolved CheechRockwizard

    (@cheechrockwizard)


    4 years, 5 months ago

    Just a heads-up for other users of this plugin and the developers.

    In my Google Analytics reports, I’d recently noticed lots (thousands) of requests to URLs with these three sets of odd parameters:
    /products/product-name/????/user-new.php=
    /products/product-name/????/plugins.php=
    /products/product-name/????/theme-editor.php=

    On further investigation, the page for the product-name in question never completely loaded. On stopping the load, Chrome was asking if I wanted to save a password for a user named woosales_wordpress@gmails.com.

    Also, during my investigations, I did on occasion receive “429 Too Many Requests” errors from Apache.

    I noticed the three products in question had been added to a newly created demo PPOM category and then that two additional Administrator WP accounts had been created. This new PPOM category was running an external JavaScript file. Unfortunately, I no longer have the URL as I just cleaned it out.

    I removed the Administrators and the PPOM groups and updated from 18.4 to 18.6, which has hopefully resolved the exploit although I’ve not read the release notes. I’ll be keeping a close eye for similar activity over the coming weeks.

    If the developers are unaware of this they may want to look into it.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • N-Media

    (@nmedia)

    4 years, 5 months ago

    Hi @cheechrockwizard,

    Thanks for sharing these details but didn’t face or reported an issue like this. Every of the our inputs is sanitized and scripts are properly enqueued. If you still found any issue please let me know, I will see this ASAP.

    Gal Baras

    (@galbaras)

    4 years, 5 months ago

    @cheechrockwizard it looks like you might need more secure hosting or a good security plugin (iThemes Security or Wordfence)

    Thread Starter CheechRockwizard

    (@cheechrockwizard)

    4 years, 5 months ago

    So you did know about it…

    “This issue was older version but current version doesn’t have bad script.”

    https://wordpress.org/support/topic/admin-user-creating-attack-4/

    Hopefully, this is fixed in 18.6 as I haven’t so far seen a recurrence of the issue.

    And thanks, Gal, but it doesn’t seem WordFence picked up on this issue either, nor did iThemes Security as I’m running that already!

    Gal Baras

    (@galbaras)

    4 years, 5 months ago

    @cheechrockwizard security issues are best kept hush hush, and on 18.5, I don’t see external scripts being loaded.

    BTW, it seems like your site was not letting anyone in. Getting too many connections probably just means you were under a serious attack and your server quota was maxed out.

    Still, to be sure, can you provide a way to replicate the problem, so that it can be tested properly?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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