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Tag Archives: iThemes Security

26 Sep 2016

No WordPress Security Plugins Protected Against Recently Disclosed Vulnerability That Exposes WooCommerce Order Data

Recently we started testing to see what protection WordPress security plugins provide against vulnerabilities in other plugins (since plugins vulnerabilities are an actual source of websites being hacked, unlike some other things that these plugins make a big deal or providing protection against). The first vulnerability we tested could be used for serving up malware on a website and the second could give an attacker control over the website. Both of those are types of vulnerabilities that are the kind that are often thought of when discussing the security of websites, for example the very popular Wordfence plugin is advertised as “protecting your website from hacks and malware”. Not every security issue though falls into those categories. As you can guess from the name, an information disclosure vulnerability involves the disclosure of information that isn’t intended to be public and those can be a serious issue. For example, if you run an eCommerce you wouldn’t want your customers’ details to be accessible by the public.

WooCommerce is an popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress, which has over 1+ million active installs according to wordpress.org (we use it on this website). There are numerous plugins that expand on its functionality. The security of those isn’t always good. Among the issue we have found in some of those plugins this year were two arbitrary file upload vulnerabilities and a vulnerability that allowed changing the price of products. Recently David Peltier discovered that the plugin Order / Coupon / Subscription Export Import Plugin for WooCommerce (BASIC) had an information disclosure vulnerability that allowed anyone to get a copy of the orders made through WooCommerce on the website. Including in that is not only the details of the order, but the customer’s details, including address and email adress. That vulnerability has now been fixed. [Read more]

22 Sep 2016

Only One WordPress Security Plugin Fully Protected Against a Recently Disclosed Arbitrary File Upload Vulnerability

Last week we did our first test to see what protection that WordPress security plugins can provide against the exploitation of the vulnerabilities in plugins. The results for a persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability were not good, with only 2 of the 11 plugins tested providing any protection and even the protection in those two was easily bypassed.

Earlier this week we disclosed a set of arbitrary file upload vulnerabilities in four plugins by the same developer. While these vulnerabilities are of the type that are likely to be exploited (you can now know how likely vulnerabilities are to be exploited with our service), after we contacted the developer, they took two weeks to fix one and the other three have yet to be fixed two months later. That shows a couple of the problems with being able to protect against plugin vulnerabilities at this time, one being that vulnerabilities are not fixed in a timely manner and the other being that simply keeping you plugins up to date will not protect you. [Read more]

12 Sep 2016

WordPress Security Plugins Provide Little to No Protection Against Recently Discovered Persistent XSS Vulnerability

In the past few months we have done several one off tests of WordPress security plugins to see if they could prevent exploitation of a vulnerability in a plugin. We tested an extraordinary claim by Wordfence that their plugin could prevent persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) and found that it failed both with a vulnerability that required authentication and one that didn’t. We also tested the iThemes Security security plugin against an arbitrary file upload vulnerability that we have found was being exploited in another plugin by one that plugin’s developers and it also failed to prevent exploitation.

That these plugins failed to prevent these vulnerabilities from being exploited wasn’t all that surprising considering the poor state of the security community overall and in particular the one surrounding WordPress. Whether it is security companies making up threats, not understanding the difference between vulnerabilities, or spreading false information about WordPress installations being vulnerable due to not understanding how WordPress handles security updates, it is clear that there isn’t a good understanding of security by the people and companies in the security community. [Read more]

19 Aug 2016

iThemes Security Fails to Protect Against Likely Exploited Arbitrary File Upload Vulnerability

One of the things we have been doing recently to improve the security of WordPress websites is tracking down vulnerabilities in plugins that appear to be known and being exploited by hackers but have been missed by WordPress security companies. Through that we recently spotted an arbitrary file upload vulnerability in the plugin Attachment Manager, which a hacker may have been exploiting since at least June of last year. While trying to find the best way to contact the developer about the issue we noticed that they are listed as being one of the of the developers of the iThemes Security plugin. While that might say a lot about the current state of WordPress security plugins, the developer did fix the vulnerability the same day we reported to them, despite the plugin not having been last updated 7 years ago before that, which is much better than the average response from developers when notified of vulnerabilities in their plugins.

We hadn’t really looked to closely at the iThemes Security plugin in the past, but a couple of things we noticed in passing earlier this year didn’t point to it being from trustworthy company since the plugin had a button that when clicked would claim the website had been “Secured” despite nothing else happening and they are using the non-existent threat of brute force attacks to collect the email address of the plugin’s users . [Read more]