WordPress | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A second security flaw impacting the OttoKit (formerly SureTriggers ) WordPress plugin has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-27007 (CVSS score: 9.8), is a privilege escalation bug impacting all versions of the plugin prior to and including version 1.0.82.  "This is due to the create_wp_connection() function missing a capability check and insufficiently verifying a user's authentication credentials," Wordfence said . "This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to establish a connection, which ultimately can make privilege escalation possible." That said, the vulnerability is exploitable only in two possible scenarios - When a site has never enabled or used an application password, and OttoKit has never been connected to the website using an application password before When an attacker has authenticated access to a site and can generate a valid application password Wordfence revealed that it obs...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a new campaign targeting WordPress sites that disguises the malware as a security plugin. The plugin, which goes by the name "WP-antymalwary-bot.php," comes with a variety of features to maintain access, hide itself from the admin dashboard, and execute remote code. "Pinging functionality that can report back to a command-and-control (C&C) server is also included, as is code that helps spread malware into other directories and inject malicious JavaScript responsible for serving ads," Wordfence's Marco Wotschka said in a report. First discovered during a site cleanup effort in late January 2025, the malware has since been detected in the wild with new variants. Some of the other names used for the plugin are listed below - addons.php wpconsole.php wp-performance-booster.php scr.php Once installed and activated, it provides threat actors administrator access to the dashboard and makes use of the REST API...

Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) is the backbone of modern identity management, enabling secure access to the applications, data, and services your business relies on. As hybrid work and cloud adoption accelerate, Entra ID plays an even more central role — managing authentication, enforcing policy, and connecting users across distributed environments. That prominence also makes it a prime target. Microsoft reports over 600 million attacks on Entra ID every day. These aren't just random attempts, but include coordinated, persistent, and increasingly automated campaigns designed to exploit even small vulnerabilities. Which brings us to the core question: Are Entra ID's native protections enough? Where do they fall short — and what steps should you take to close the gaps and ensure you're covered? Understanding Entra ID At its core, Microsoft Entra ID is your enterprise identity and access management system. It defines how users prove who they are, what resources...

Cybersecurity researchers have revealed that RansomHub 's online infrastructure has "inexplicably" gone offline as of April 1, 2025, prompting concerns among affiliates of the ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation. Singaporean cybersecurity company Group-IB said that this may have caused affiliates to migrate to Qilin, given that "disclosures on its DLS [data leak site] have doubled since February."  RansomHub, which first emerged in February 2024, is estimated to have stolen data from over 200 victims. It replaced two high-profile RaaS groups, LockBit and BlackCat, to become a frontrunner, courting their affiliates, including Scattered Spider and Evil Corp , with lucrative payment splits. "Following a possible acquisition of the web application and ransomware source code of Knight (formerly Cyclops), RansomHub quickly rose in the ransomware scene, thanks to the dynamic features of its multi-platform encryptor and an aggressive, affiliate-friendly ...

Cybersecurity researchers are warning about a large-scale phishing campaign targeting WooCommerce users with a fake security alert urging them to download a "critical patch" but deploy a backdoor instead. WordPress security company Patchstack described the activity as sophisticated and a variant of another campaign observed in December 2023 that employed a fake CVE ploy to breach sites running the popular content management system (CMS). Given the similarities in the phishing email lures, the bogus web pages, and the identical methods employed to conceal the malware, it's believed the latest attack wave is either the work of the same threat actor or it's a new cluster closely mimicking the earlier one. "They claim the targeted websites are impacted by a (non-existent) 'Unauthenticated Administrative Access' vulnerability, and they urge you to visit their phishing website, which uses an IDN homograph attack to disguise itself as the official WooComm...

A newly disclosed high-severity security flaw impacting OttoKit (formerly SureTriggers) has come under active exploitation within a few hours of public disclosure. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-3102 (CVSS score: 8.1), is an authorization bypass bug that could permit an attacker to create administrator accounts under certain conditions and take control of susceptible websites. "The SureTriggers: All-in-One Automation Platform plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to an authentication bypass leading to administrative account creation due to a missing empty value check on the 'secret_key' value in the 'autheticate_user' function in all versions up to, and including, 1.0.78," Wordfence's István Márton said . "This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to create administrator accounts on the target website when the plugin is installed and activated but not configured with an API key." Successful exploitation of the vulnerabilit...

Threat hunters are warning of a sophisticated web skimmer campaign that leverages a legacy application programming interface (API) from payment processor Stripe to validate stolen payment information prior to exfiltration. "This tactic ensures that only valid card data is sent to the attackers, making the operation more efficient and potentially harder to detect," Jscrambler researchers Pedro Fortuna, David Alves, and Pedro Marrucho said in a report. As many as 49 merchants are estimated to have been affected by the campaign to date. Fifteen of the compromised sites have taken action to remove the malicious script injections. The activity is assessed to be ongoing since at least August 20, 2024. Details of the campaign were first flagged by security firm Source Defense towards the end of February 2025, detailing the web skimmer's use of the " api.stripe[.]com/v1/sources " API, which allows applications to accept various payment methods. The endpoint has...

Threat actors are using the "mu-plugins" directory in WordPress sites to conceal malicious code with the goal of maintaining persistent remote access and redirecting site visitors to bogus sites. mu-plugins, short for must-use plugins , refers to plugins in a special directory ("wp-content/mu-plugins") that are automatically executed by WordPress without the need to enable them explicitly via the admin dashboard. This also makes the directory an ideal location for staging malware. "This approach represents a concerning trend, as the mu-plugins (Must-Use plugins) are not listed in the standard WordPress plugin interface, making them less noticeable and easier for users to ignore during routine security checks," Sucuri researcher Puja Srivastava said in an analysis. In the incidents analyzed by the website security company, three different kinds of rogue PHP code have been discovered in the directory - "wp-content/mu-plugins/redirect.php," ...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a new phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform that leverages the Domain Name System ( DNS ) mail exchange ( MX ) records to serve fake login pages that impersonate about 114 brands. DNS intelligence firm Infoblox is tracking the actor behind the PhaaS, the phishing kit, and the related activity under the moniker Morphing Meerkat . "The threat actor behind the campaigns often exploits open redirects on adtech infrastructure, compromises domains for phishing distribution, and distributes stolen credentials through several mechanisms, including Telegram," the company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. One such campaign leveraging the PhaaS toolkit was documented by Forcepoint in July 2024, where phishing emails contained links to a purported shared document that, when clicked, directed the recipient to a fake login page hosted on Cloudflare R2 with the end goal of collecting and exfiltrating the credentials via Tele...

An ongoing campaign that infiltrates legitimate websites with malicious JavaScript injects to promote Chinese-language gambling platforms has ballooned to compromise approximately 150,000 sites to date. "The threat actor has slightly revamped their interface but is still relying on an iframe injection to display a full-screen overlay in the visitor's browser," c/side security analyst Himanshu Anand said in a new analysis. As of writing, there are over 135,800 sites containing the JavaScript payload, per statistics from PublicWWW. As documented by the website security company last month, the campaign involves infecting websites with malicious JavaScript that's designed to hijack the user's browser window to redirect site visitors to pages promoting gambling platforms. The redirections have been found to occur via JavaScript hosted on five different domains (e.g., "zuizhongyj[.]com") that, in turn, serve the main payload responsible for performing...

Over 1,000 websites powered by WordPress have been infected with a third-party JavaScript code that injects four separate backdoors. "Creating four backdoors facilitates the attackers having multiple points of re-entry should one be detected and removed," c/side researcher Himanshu Anand said in a Wednesday analysis. The malicious JavaScript code has been found to be served via cdn.csyndication[.]com. As of writing, as many as 908 websites contain references to the domain in question. The functions of the four backdoors are explained below - Backdoor 1, which uploads and installs a fake plugin named "Ultra SEO Processor," which is then used to execute attacker-issued commands Backdoor 2, which injects malicious JavaScript into wp-config.php Backdoor 3, which adds an attacker-controlled SSH key to the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file so as to allow persistent remote access to the machine Backdoor 4, which is designed to execute remote commands and fetches anot...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a credit card stealing malware campaign that has been observed targeting e-commerce sites running Magento by disguising the malicious content within image tags in HTML code in order to stay under the radar. MageCart is the name given to a malware that's capable of stealing sensitive payment information from online shopping sites. The attacks are known to employ a wide range of techniques – both on client- and server-side – to compromise websites and deploy credit card skimmers to facilitate theft. Typically, such malware is only triggered or loaded when users visit the checkout pages to enter credit card details by either serving a fake form or capturing the information entered by the victims in real time. The term MageCart is a reference to the original target of these cybercrime groups, the Magento platform that offers checkout and shopping cart features for online retailers. Over the years, such campaigns adapted their tactics by conce...

A Russian-speaking cybercrime gang known as Crazy Evil has been linked to over 10 active social media scams that leverage a wide range of tailored lures to deceive victims and trick them into installing malware such as StealC , Atomic macOS Stealer (aka AMOS ), and Angel Drainer . "Specializing in identity fraud, cryptocurrency theft, and information-stealing malware, Crazy Evil employs a well-coordinated network of traffers — social engineering experts tasked with redirecting legitimate traffic to malicious phishing pages," Recorded Future's Insikt Group said in an analysis. The use of a diverse malware arsenal cryptoscam group is a sign that the threat actor is targeting users of both Windows and macOS systems, posing a risk to the decentralized finance ecosystem. Crazy Evil has been assessed to be active since at least 2021, functioning primarily as a traffer team tasked with redirecting legitimate traffic to malicious landing pages operated by other criminal cre...

Cybersecurity researchers have exposed a new campaign that targets web servers running PHP-based applications to promote gambling platforms in Indonesia. "Over the past two months, a significant volume of attacks from Python-based bots has been observed, suggesting a coordinated effort to exploit thousands of web apps," Imperva researcher Daniel Johnston said in an analysis. "These attacks appear tied to the proliferation of gambling-related sites, potentially as a response to the heightened government scrutiny ." The Thales-owned company said it has detected millions of requests originating from a Python client that includes a command to install GSocket (aka Global Socket), an open-source tool that can be used to establish a communication channel between two machines regardless of the network perimeter. It's worth noting that GSocket has been put to use in many a cryptojacking operation in recent months, not to mention even exploiting the access provi...

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed a new adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) phishing kit that's capable of Microsoft 365 accounts with an aim to steal credentials and two-factor authentication (2FA) codes since at least October 2024. The nascent phishing kit has been dubbed Sneaky 2FA by French cybersecurity company Sekoia, which detected it in the wild in December. Nearly 100 domains hosting Sneaky 2FA phishing pages have been identified as of this month, suggesting moderate adoption by threat actors. "This kit is being sold as phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) by the cybercrime service 'Sneaky Log,' which operates through a fully-featured bot on Telegram," the company said in an analysis. "Customers reportedly receive access to a licensed obfuscated version of the source code and deploy it independently." Phishing campaigns have been observed sending payment receipt-related emails to entice recipients into opening bogus PDF documents containing QR co...

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed an attack that involved a threat actor utilizing a Python-based backdoor to maintain persistent access to compromised endpoints and then leveraged this access to deploy the RansomHub ransomware throughout the target network. According to GuidePoint Security , initial access is said to have been facilitated by means of a JavaScript malware downloaded named SocGholish (aka FakeUpdates), which is known to be distributed via drive-by campaigns that trick unsuspecting users into downloading bogus web browser updates. Such attacks commonly involve the use of legitimate-but-infected websites that victims are redirected to from search engine results using black hat Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. Upon execution, SocGholish establishes contact with an attacker-controlled server to retrieve secondary payloads. As recently as last year, SocGholish campaigns have targeted WordPress sites relying on outdated versions of popular SEO plug...