24 Jun 2021

WordPress Fancy Product Designer exploit

Today in my web server logs I noticed repeated scans for "fancy-product-designer" - a WordPress plugin which I most definitely don't have installed.

Few Google searches later, I found an article by Wordfence titled "Critical 0-day in Fancy Product Designer Under Active Attack". As usual, all the important details were missing from their article, so I decided to fill-in the gaps. smile

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22 Apr 2021

Kaswara exploit or how much Wordfence cares about user security

Yesterday, an alert describing vulnerability in Kaswara Modern VC Addons was published on WPScan.

The plugin allows unauthenticated arbitrary file upload via the 'uploadFontIcon' AJAX action. The supplied zipfile being unzipped in the wp-content/uploads/kaswara/fonts_icon directory with no checks for malicious files such as PHP.

Alert explicitly warns that the bug is actively being exploited. Alert also provided a very limited indicators of compromise - incomplete but at least something..

Later that day, "WordPress security vendor" Wordfence published their article Remove Kaswara Modern WPBakery Page Builder Addons Plugin Immediately.

They repeated what was already said in the alert mentioned above and gave 2 extremely "useful" suggestions. First suggestion is in the post title - remove the plugin. Second suggestion is to pay for Wordfence services. Because Wordfence free version will start protecting users only in end of May 2021:

May 21, 2021 – Wordfence Free users receive the firewall rules.

Think about it for a moment..

Wordfence knows the issue is actively being exploited. They know exactly what the issue is. But they don't care about you or your security! All they care about is their profit. So, unless you pay a hefty sum for their "services", you're screwed.

I think it's wrong, so let's fix that! smile

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04 Jun 2020

Stealing WordPress credentials

Yesterday WordFence published a scary article titled "Large Scale Attack Campaign Targets Database Credentials". Article describes a recent mass-scanning attack of WordPress sites. The purpose of the attack was stealing WordPress configuration files - and therefore usernames/passwords of WordPress admins.

As with the XSS campaigns, almost all of the attacks are targeted at older vulnerabilities in outdated plugins or themes that allow files to be downloaded or exported. In this case the attackers are attempting to download wp-config.php, a file critical to all WordPress installations which contains database credentials and connection information, in addition to authentication unique keys and salts.

Since WordFence is in the business of selling "the best WordPress security", they have little intention to explain how these attacks really work.

Instead, they blatantly advertise their product as a remedy for everything:

All Wordfence users, including sites running the free version of Wordfence, and Wordfence Premium, are protected against these attacks.

That's really not helpful, so let me fix that. smile
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