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Tag Archives: Delete All Comments

16 Dec 2016

No WordPress Security Plugin Prevented Exploitation of Unfixed Arbitrary File Upload Vulnerability in Popular Plugin

When it comes to the chances of vulnerabilities being exploited the reality is that many types of vulnerabilities are highly unlikely to have anyone even try to exploit them. Unfortunately far too often we see security companies and the press making a big deal of vulnerabilities that are are of little to no threat, while ignoring vulnerabilities and broader security issues that are leading to websites being hacked (that lead us to providing information on likelihood that a vulnerability is to be exploited to the data for our service). When it comes to types that are likely to be exploited, the arbitrary file upload vulnerability, which allows a hacker to upload files of any kind to a website, is probably the one with the most exploit attempts and also then ends up leading to the most websites being hacked. So if a WordPress security plugin is going to protect against any type of vulnerability this seems like this is the one you would most want it to be able protect against.

Back in September we tested out security plugins against this type of vulnerability and the results were not good. Of the 12 plugins tested only 3 provided any protection. The protections 2 of them provide was easily bypassed for this particular vulnerability and the remaining plugin’s protection also meant that Editor level and below users could not upload files either. [Read more]

15 Dec 2016

When a Security Company Does the Right Thing and The WordPress Plugin Directory Drops the Ball

Due to how bad the security industry is we rarely have the ability to point to a situation where the a security company has done the right thing, but today we have one to discuss.

Yesterday, we discussed how security companies rarely do one of the three basic components of a proper hack cleanup, which is to try to determine how the website was hacked. As we mentioned in that post, in instances where that isn’t done we are frequently brought in to re-clean the websites after they get hacked again. The problem of not determining how the websites are hacked doesn’t always just impact that website, if the vulnerability exploited exists in the current version of software on the website then spotting an early exploitation has the possibility of limiting the amount of additional websites that get hacked due to it. That possibility occurred with an arbitrary file upload vulnerability that exists in the WordPress plugin Delete All Comments. On November 20 the security company NinTechNet was looking into a hacked website and found the website was hacked due to that vulnerability. It wasn’t all that hard to spot with the combination of the logging and the code in the plugin, but since so many security companies don’t even try to determine how the websites they are cleaning up have  been hacked, something like that can easily get missed. [Read more]