Update Now! Severe Vulnerability Impacting 600,000 Sites Patched in Limit Login Attempts

On January 26, 2023, the Wordfence team responsibly disclosed an unauthenticated stored Cross-Site Scripting vulnerability in Limit Login Attempts, a WordPress plugin installed on over 600,000 sites that provides site owners with the ability to block IP addresses that have made repeated failed...

Friday Long Read: What To Do About AI

This is a Friday long-read, so grab a warm cup of something and kick back because were going to take our time on this. The world is about to profoundly change. I know youre nervous - perhaps excited and optimistic, but if youve been paying attention and have been watching the trajectory of this...

Wordfence Intelligence Weekly WordPress Vulnerability Report (Mar 27, 2023 to Apr 2, 2023)

Last week, there were 82 vulnerabilities disclosed in 70 WordPress Plugins and 1 WordPress theme that have been added to the Wordfence Intelligence Vulnerability Database, and there were 34 Vulnerability Researchers that contributed to WordPress Security last week. Review those vulnerabilities in...

Wordfence Intelligence Weekly WordPress Vulnerability Report (Mar 20, 2023 to Mar 26, 2023)

Last week, there were 80 vulnerabilities disclosed in 69 WordPress Plugins and 1 WordPress theme that have been added to the Wordfence Intelligence Vulnerability Database, and there were 31 Vulnerability Researchers that contributed to WordPress Security last week. Review those vulnerabilities in...

PSA: Update Now! Critical Authentication Bypass in WooCommerce Payments Allows Site Takeover

This post has been updated with additional information that has become available since its publication The Wordfence Threat Intelligence team regularly monitors plugin updates and reviews any indicating that a potential security issue may have been addressed. Today, March 23, 2023, we noticed tha...

Wordfence Intelligence Weekly WordPress Vulnerability Report (Mar 13, 2023 to Mar 19, 2023)

Last week, there were 92 vulnerabilities disclosed in 76 WordPress Plugins and 7 WordPress themes that have been added to the Wordfence Intelligence Vulnerability Database, and there were 34 Vulnerability Researchers that contributed to WordPress Security last week. Review those vulnerabilities i...

Multiple Reflected Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerabilities in Three WordPress Plugins Patched

The Wordfence Threat Intelligence Team recently disclosed several Reflected Cross-Site Scripting vulnerabilities that we discovered in three different plugins - Watu Quiz installed on 5,000 sites, GN-Publisher installed on 40,000 sites, and Japanized For WooCommerce installed on 10,000 sites. As...

Wordfence Intelligence Weekly WordPress Vulnerability Report (Mar 6, 2023 to Mar 12, 2023)

Last week, there were 60 vulnerabilities disclosed in 40 WordPress Plugins and 1 WordPress theme that have been added to the Wordfence Intelligence Vulnerability Database, and there were 16 Vulnerability Researchers that contributed to WordPress Security last week. Review those vulnerabilities in...

Vulnerability Patched in Cozmolabs Profile Builder Plugin – Information Disclosure Leads to Account Takeover

Hundreds, if not thousands of WordPress plugins are conceived with the idea of making site building and maintenance easier for site owners. They add features not available in WordPress Core that would otherwise require site owners to write their own code to extend functionality. However, these...

Wordfence Intelligence Weekly WordPress Vulnerability Report (Feb 27, 2023 to Mar 5, 2023)

Wordfence has curated an industry leading vulnerability database with all known WordPress core, theme, and plugin vulnerabilities known as Wordfence Intelligence. This database is continuously updated, maintained, and populated by Wordfences highly credentialed and experienced vulnerability...

PSA: Intentionally Leaving Backdoors in Your Code Can Lead to Fines and Jail Time

In the cybersecurity field, we talk a lot about threat actors and vulnerable code, but what doesn’t get discussed enough is intentional vulnerabilities and becoming your own threat actor. Even when making decisions with the best of intentions, it is possible to work against your own best interest...

Wordfence Intelligence: Because Community Created Vulnerabilities Are Community Property

Last August, at Black Hat 2022 in Las Vegas, we launched Wordfence Intelligence, a product designed to provide large enterprise customers with rich IP threat data, malware signatures, malware hashes, and vulnerability data to help keep enterprise customers and networks secure. Our mission at...

Wordfence Intelligence Weekly WordPress Vulnerability Report (Feb 20, 2023 to Feb 26, 2023)

Wordfence has curated an industry leading vulnerability database with all known WordPress core, theme, and plugin vulnerabilities known as Wordfence Intelligence Community Edition. This database is continuously updated, maintained, and populated by Wordfences highly credentialed and experienced...

Wordfence WooCommerce 2FA: Set Up This New Feature To Protect Your Customers

On February 15, we made the exciting announcement that the latest release of Wordfence, version 7.9.0, includes a new feature: WooCommerce 2FA two-factor authentication for customer level users. What does this mean for you as an e-commerce store operator? And how can you start using this feature?...

The WordPress Ecosystem is Becoming More Secure with Responsible Disclosure Becoming More Common

The Wordfence 2022 State of WordPress Security Report was released on January 24th, 2023. One area that we reviewed in this report were the vulnerabilities disclosed in 2022. Keeping in mind that some vulnerabilities affected multiple plugins, themes, and WordPress core, a total of 2,370...

All In One SEO Pack Vulnerabilities Impacting 3 Million Sites Patched

On January 26, 2023, the Wordfence Team responsibly disclosed two vulnerabilities in All In One SEO Pack, a WordPress plugin installed on over 3 Million sites which provides search engine optimization tools designed to help content creators optimize their sites and reach more users. Both reported...

Wordfence Intelligence CE Weekly Vulnerability Report (Feb 13, 2023 to Feb 19, 2023)

Wordfence has curated an industry leading vulnerability database with all known WordPress core, theme, and plugin vulnerabilities known as Wordfence Intelligence Community Edition. This database is continuously updated, maintained, and populated by Wordfences highly credentialed and experienced...

Authorization vs. Intent: Why You Should Always Verify Both

The Wordfence Threat Intelligence team has observed a recent increase in the number of partial vulnerability patches that don’t properly address separate underlying issues. More specifically, we have been seeing an increase in Missing Authorization vulnerabilities that are fixed using tools...

Wordfence Intelligence CE Weekly Vulnerability Report (Feb 6, 2023 to Feb 12, 2023)

In case you missed it, Wordfence has curated an industry leading vulnerability database with all known WordPress core, theme, and plugin vulnerabilities known as Wordfence Intelligence Community Edition. This database is continuously updated, maintained, and populated by Wordfences highly...

Wordfence Adds Two Factor Auth for WooCommerce Customers

Wordfence 7.9.0 has been released and it includes a very exciting feature for WooCommerce sites and other WordPress sites wanting to make two factor authentication 2fa available to their site users or members. Wordfence 7.9.0 now lets you give your users the ability to configure 2fa on their...

Wordfence Intelligence CE Weekly Vulnerability Report (1-30-2023 to 2-5-2023)

In case you missed it, Wordfence has curated an industry leading vulnerability database with all known WordPress core, theme and, plugin vulnerabilities known as Wordfence Intelligence Community Edition. This database is continuously updated, maintained, and populated by Wordfences highly...

High-Severity XSS Vulnerability in Metform Elementor Contact Form Builder

On January 4, 2023, independent security researcher Mohammed Chemouri reached out to the Wordfence Vulnerability Disclosure program to responsibly disclose and request a CVE ID for a vulnerability in Metform Elementor Contact Form Builder, a WordPress plugin with over 100,000 installations. The...

Multiple Vulnerabilities Patched in Quick Restaurant Menu Plugin

On January 16, 2023, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team responsibly disclosed several vulnerabilities in Quick Restaurant Menu, a WordPress plugin that allows users to set up restaurant menus on their sites. This plugin is vulnerable to Missing Authorization, Insecure Direct Object Reference,...

The Wordfence 2022 State of WordPress Security Report

Today, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team is releasing our 2022 State of WordPress Security Report as a free White Paper. In our report, we look at changes in the threat landscape, analyze impactful trends, and provide recommendations based on our findings. While most of our recommendations...

PSA: Your Site Isn’t Hacked By This Bitcoin Scam, Keep the Money

On January 19th, 2023, a member of the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team received an email from their personal blog, claiming the site had been hacked, and we received two reports from Wordfence users who received the same message. The email claimed that the site had been hacked due to a...

Holiday Attack Spikes Target Ancient Vulnerabilities and Hidden Webshells

Winter brings a number of holidays in a short period of time, and many organizations shut down or run a skeleton crew for a week or more at the end of the year and beginning of the new year. This makes it easier for would-be attackers to find success as systems are not as closely monitored. This...

Eleven Vulnerabilities Patched in Royal Elementor Addons

On December 23, 2022, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team initiated the responsible disclosure process for a set of 11 vulnerabilities in Royal Elementor Addons, a WordPress plugin with over 100,000 installations. The plugin developers responded on December 26, and we sent over the full...

PSA: YITH WooCommerce Gift Cards Premium Plugin Exploited in the Wild

The Wordfence Threat Intelligence team has been tracking exploits targeting a Critical Severity Arbitrary File Upload vulnerability in YITH WooCommerce Gift Cards Premium, a plugin with over 50,000 installations according to the vendor. The vulnerability, reported by security researcher Dave Jong...

Exploiting WordPress Plugin Vulnerabilities to Steal AWS Metadata

In an ideal world, vulnerabilities would not exist. A request would be sent to a server, properly validated, and only the intended information would be provided by the server. Of course, this is not a perfect world, and vulnerabilities can be introduced unintentionally, or even found due to...

How Much is Your Hacked Site Worth?

The Wordfence Threat Intelligence team has recently concluded an investigation of online marketplaces, colloquially known as “shops” by threat actors, selling access to compromised services. While contemporary threat actors primarily coordinate and conduct business through Telegram channels,...

Wordfence Launches Free Vulnerability Database For Commercial Use – And Launches Security Portal

Today we are incredibly excited to announce that Wordfence is launching an entirely free vulnerability database API and web interface, available for commercial use by hosting companies, security organizations, threat analysts, security researchers, and the WordPress user community. This is part o...

Spikes in Attacks Serve as a Reminder to Update Plugins

The Wordfence Threat Intelligence team continually monitors trends in the attack data we collect. Occasionally an unusual trend will arise from this data, and we have spotted one such trend standing out over the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. and the first weekend in December. Attack attempts...

Configuration Probing: Your Backups Might Be Your Greatest Weakness

Configuration files exist to make life easier for developers and website operators. In a world without configuration files, every instance of code that depended on a database connection could potentially require the connection details to be hard coded or manually entered. Other reusable data woul...

Wordfence 7.8.0 Is Out! Here Is What Is Included

Wordfence 7.8.0 is out! A huge thanks to our quality assurance team, our team of developers and our ops team for planning, implementing and releasing Wordfence 7.8.0. This release has several fixes to make Wordfence even more robust, and includes a fundamental change in the way our signup works...

Not Just for the Government: Using the NIST Framework to Secure WordPress

When setting up a WordPress website, it is easy to focus on the look and feel of the website, while overlooking the important aspect of security. This makes sense, because the security of a website is largely invisible until something goes wrong. Installing a cybersecurity plugin like Wordfence...

Russian Hacktivist Group Targets Political Websites with DDOS Attacks

A Russian hacktivist group calling itself “The People’s Cyberarmy” called on its members to target the American Democratic party website at with DDOS Distributed Denial of Service attacks this morning, November 8th, 2022, which is Election Day in the United States. A post in their Telegram channe...

Missing Authorization Vulnerability in Blog2Social Plugin

On October 5, 2022, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team responsibly disclosed a Missing Authorization vulnerability in Blog2Social, a WordPress plugin installed on over 70,000 sites that allows users to set up post sharing to various social networks. Vulnerable versions of the plugin make it...

Wordfence Premium Price Increase Coming in December – The First Since 2016

It has been over 6 years since we last raised our prices. Since then our team has more than doubled in size and we have introduced significant improvements to the core Wordfence product, launched a range of free and paid products, and introduced new services that include 24 hour incident response...

What Does The Fox Hack? Breaking Down the Anonymous Fox F-Automatical Script

While performing routine security research, one of our threat analysts discovered the latest version of a Command and Control C2 script, which is referred to as F-Automatical within the script’s code and was commonly known as FoxAuto in older versions. This is the seventh version of this automati...

Wordfence Intelligence Launches New Malware Hash Feed!

Today, the Wordfence team is launching a Malware Hash Feed as part of our Wordfence Intelligence API. This gives our Enterprise users another way to rapidly and definitively identify malware targeting web applications. As the world’s foremost WordPress security provider, Wordfence has an expertly...

Threat Advisory: Monitoring CVE-2022-42889 “Text4Shell” Exploit Attempts

On October 17, 2022, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team began monitoring for activity targeting CVE-2022-42889, or “Text4Shell” on our network of 4 million websites. We started seeing activity targeting this vulnerability on October 18, 2022. Text4Shell is a vulnerability in the Apache Common...

Two Weeks of Monitoring ProxyNotShell (CVE-2022-41040 & CVE-2022-41082) Threat Activity

The Wordfence Threat Intelligence team has been monitoring exploit attempts targeting two zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server tracked as CVE-2022-41040 and CVE-2022-41082, collectively known as ProxyNotShell. These vulnerabilities are actively being exploited in the wild. At the...

Patch Now: The WordPress 6.0.3 Security Update Contains Important Fixes

The WordPress 6.0.3 Security Update contains patches for a large number of vulnerabilities, most of which are low in severity or require a highly privileged user account or additional vulnerable code in order to exploit. As with every WordPress core release containing security fixes, the Wordfenc...

Threat Advisory: CVE-2022-40684 Fortinet Appliance Auth bypass

This morning, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team began tracking exploit attempts targeting CVE-2022-40684 on our network of over 4 million protected websites. CVE-2022-40684 is a critical authentication bypass vulnerability in the administrative interface of Fortinet’s FortiGate firewalls,...

National Cyber Security Awareness Month: You Could Be the Biggest Threat to Your WordPress Site

October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month in the U.S., and this year’s theme is “See Yourself in Cyber.” What is really being said by this theme is that we all have a role to play in cyber security, whether we work in the industry or not. With this in mind, the Cybersecurity and...

Wordfence 7.7.0 Is Out! Here Are The Changes

Wordfence 7.7.0 has just been released and as usual, it includes several awesome enhancements and updates for our security conscious WordPress publishers and e-commerce websites. This post goes into a little more detail on each change weve included. We dont usually post additional detail like thi...

Cross-Site Scripting: The Real WordPress Supervillain

Vulnerabilities are a fact of life for anyone managing a website, even when using a well-established content management system like WordPress. Not all vulnerabilities are equal, with some allowing access to sensitive data that would normally be hidden from public view, while others could allow a...

PSA: Zero-Day Vulnerability in WPGateway Actively Exploited in the Wild

On September 8, 2022, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team became aware of an actively exploited zero-day vulnerability being used to add a malicious administrator user to sites running the WPGateway plugin. We released a firewall rule to Wordfence Premium, Wordfence Care, and Wordfence Respons...

PSA: Nearly 5 Million Attacks Blocked Targeting 0-Day in BackupBuddy Plugin

Late evening, on September 6, 2022, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team was alerted to the presence of a vulnerability being actively exploited in BackupBuddy, a WordPress plugin we estimate has around 140,000 active installations. This vulnerability makes it possible for unauthenticated users...

WordPress Core 6.0.2 Security & Maintenance Release – What You Need to Know

On August 30, 2022, the WordPress core team released WordPress version 6.0.2, which contains patches for 3 vulnerabilities, including a High Severity SQLi vulnerability in the Links functionality as well as two Medium Severity Cross-Site Scripting vulnerabilities. These patches have been backport...