News Release: Regarding WordPress CMS Websites
A very large number of WordPress websites were compromised in the last month with a new malware campaign making its rounds.
WordPress is a very popular and widely used, free/open-source, content management system (CMS) thus is targeted by hackers at a large scale.
Researches have detected that this specific malware campaign, aims to get access to as many devices they can by making innumerable WordPress websites its prey. This malware campaign has been active for quite a while, but has recently experienced MASSIVE increases in the spread of infections, affecting more than 5000 WordPress websites to date (and that number will probably be far higher once you read this).
These cyber criminals are using javascript functions and inserting malicious code. They are targeting already hacked (minor) WordPress sites (or un-hacked), using hidden iframes, and a number of browser exploits. So what does this mean for you? Well, basically, they can track every visitor who accesses the victimized WordPress website and further redirects them to their specially crafted page where the “Nuclear Exploit Kit” is planted.
These exploit kits are being used and can deploy attacks through vulnerabilities in plugins with an aim of data exfiltration. Not good!
Solutions?
Researchers suggest that this infection is very buggy and if removed incorrectly, it can cause the entire site to corrupt completely. This attack is going after plugins, themes, core WordPress files, and even Joomla (another CMS software). So the solution is simple, we can’t clean it out, so once we find a site infected with this code, we must just restore the site from its most recent CLEAN version of its back up. If you are hosted with us on our dedicated servers, do NOT worry, as we have back ups running multiple times a day, on top of our security systems that should “prevent” the attack from even happening, but if it does, we will just revert and save, and block the IP of the attacker. Oh the fun parts of networking and IT security!
For those of you who are NOT on our dedicated servers…BEWARE! Keep your plugins up-to-date, implement the latest security patches, keep your main core WordPress Software version up-to-date, and watch what your doing. Most importantly, ALWAYS maintain backups of your sensitive data (and full website back ups, at least done daily).
We highly recommend our Monthly Website Security Plan & Software Maintenance on our dedicated servers to help keep these “uh oh” panic scenarios from even happening. Please contact us today to see what we can do to make sure your website STAYS safe!
