This site uses cookies in accordance with our Privacy Policy.
Think Like a Hacker
Episode 107: Two Plugin Vulnerabilities Target File Upload Capabilities
The Wordfence Threat intelligence team finds vulnerabilities in two plugins, the User Profile Picture plugin and the WooCommerce Upload Files plugin. WordPress 5.7 is set to release on Tuesday, March 9 with numerous enhancements for the block editor, a new robots.txt API, and a stay of execution on jQuery-migrate. A zero day affecting Microsoft Exchange…
March 19, 2021
Episode 106: Admin Password Resets, Blockchain Botnets and a Central Management RCE
WordPress 5.7 is due to be released on March 9, and it will allow administrators to send password reset emails to users. A botnet is abusing the Bitcoin blockchain for command and control, while VMWare fixes a critical remote code execution bug in all default vCenter installations. Android users now have an easy way to…
February 26, 2021
Episode 105: The Hottest Trend in WordPress
An analysis of WordPress-related search trends found that interest in WooCommerce related results dominated during 2020. We discuss recent vulnerabilities discovered by our threat intelligence team in Ninja Forms, affecting over 1 million sites. WordPress issues a statement that pirated themes and plugins are prohibited on the repository. And a supply chain attack affects users…
February 22, 2021
Episode 104: Cryptography Demystified
This week, the Wordfence team discusses cryptography in depth, including the basics, a brief history, hashing, and the Crypto Wars. We also go over current news, including 2 new findings by the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team, a new milestone for WordPress, and a recent attack on a Florida Town’s water supply.
February 15, 2021
Episode 103: Wordfence Innovates with Machine Learning and Security for Schools
Wordfence opens the K-12 site audit and site cleaning service for publicly funded state schools worldwide. Machine learning is now a big part of our malware identification process, which will speed new malware signatures to deployment for WordPress sites protected by Wordfence. A bug in Sudo can let attackers with access to a local system…
February 5, 2021
Episode 102: Disruption Presents Opportunity
After a disruptive year in 2020, there are new challenges in 2021, but also immense opportunities in numerous fields. In a deep and wide-ranging conversation, Mark Maunder and Kathy Zant discuss artificial intelligence, whether or not we’re living in simulation, cryptocurrencies and the opportunities of blockchain technology, open source communities and publishing, avoiding scams and…
January 29, 2021
Episode 101: Supporting Remote Students with Free Site Audits & Cleanings
Wordfence announces a new program offering free site cleaning and site audits to public schools in the United States. We talk about why we’re offering this program and how to help schools take advantage of it. We also talk about the growing prevalence of WordPress as a content management system and how the incoming administration…
January 22, 2021
Episode 100: How to Lose 6 Figures the Easy Way
The recent SolarWinds attack was incredibly sophisticated. What happens when that level of sophistication targets a homebuyer during one of the largest transactions of their lifetime? On this episode, we tell the story of an extremely difficult-to-detect spearphishing attack that almost cost a homebuyer a significant amount. We review the warning signs seen in this…
January 15, 2021
Episode 99: SolarWinds Supply Chain Attack Affects Government and Fortune 500 Businesses
Earlier this week, we learned that SolarWinds, the largest provider of network management tools for government and enterprise organizations fell victim to a supply chain attack. This attack affected their Orion network management system. Reportedly, 18,000 enterprise and government customers installed malware that was digitally signed by a valid certificate as part of an update…
December 18, 2020
The Official Wordfence Mailing List
Receive WordPress security news before publication.
Episode 98: How Application Passwords Work in WordPress 5.6
WordPress 5.6 was released this week with a new feature called application passwords. In this episode we talk about how application passwords work, where to find them in your WordPress installation, and why Wordfence decided to turn these off by default in version 7.4.14. We also talk about a new Magecart attack that places card…
December 11, 2020
Episode 97: The Future of WordPress with PHP 8 and WordPress 5.6
With WordPress 5.6’s imminent release and the recent release of PHP 8, we talk about the rapid changes affecting the future of WordPress with new security features and new functionality available to both WordPress users and developers. We also review a recent vulnerability found by Google Project Zero researchers in iPhones. A social engineering attack…
December 4, 2020
Episode 96: Hosting Provider Failures and Incident Response Preparedness
Two hosting providers experienced outages this week. GoDaddy had a brief outage affecting numerous systems on Tuesday, November 17. Managed.com had an extensive outage due to ransomware that affected all systems. We discuss what types of incident response preparations site owners should consider when events beyond their control occur. We also discuss a large-scale attack…
November 20, 2020
Episode 95: Critical Privilege Escalation Vulnerabilities Affect Over 100K WordPress Sites
Three critical privilege escalation vulnerabilities in the Ultimate Member plugin put over 100,000 sites at risk. We also talk about the Page Experience metric to be added as a ranking signal for Google search in May 2021 and what this means for WordPress sites using page builders or Gutenberg. Microsoft warns against using telephone/SMS-based multi-factor…
November 13, 2020
Episode 94: Hosting Provider Exposed 63 Million Customer Records
A hosting provider exposed over 63 million customer records via an open elastic search database containing verbose logs with plain-text username/password credentials for numerous WordPress, Magento and other sites. We also talk about the security updates in WordPress 5.5.2/5.5.3 and the accidental 5.5.3-alpha autoupdate. We talk about object injection vulnerabilities like the one discovered in…
November 6, 2020
Episode 93: Nitro Documents on the Dark Web and Botnets Targeting Older Vulnerabilities
We cover a couple of breaking stories this week, including the emergency release of WordPress 5.5.3 on Friday, October 30. In preparation for this, a number of sites autoupdated to version 5.5.3-alpha. We also look at the the defacement of the Trump Campaign website, and how 2-Factor Authentication could have prevented this. We also look…
October 31, 2020
Episode 92: WordPress Forced Security Autoupdate Protects Sites from Loginizer Vulnerability
An easily exploitable SQL injection vulnerability was discovered in the Loginizer plugin installed on over one million WordPress sites, causing the WordPress team to force an update to sites using the vulnerable version. The Justice Department is filing antitrust suit against Google for allegedly monopolizing search and search advertising markets. Google Chrome gets an update…
October 23, 2020
Episode 91: How Hackers Can Use CSRF Vulnerabilities and Spearphishing to Wreak Havoc on WordPress
On this week’s episode of Think Like a Hacker, we chat about the cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability found in the Child Theme Creator by Orbisius and how attackers could use a vulnerability like this with spearphishing to wreak havoc, much like the phishing campaigns now being found on the Canva design platform. With WordPress…
October 17, 2020
Episode 90: WPBakery Plugin Vulnerability Exposes Over 4 Million Sites
A vulnerability discovered by the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team in the WPBakery plugin exposes over 4 million sites. High severity vulnerabilities were discovered in the Post Grid and Team Showcase plugins. The online avatar service Gravatar, has been exposed to a user enumeration technique, which could be abused to collect data on its users’ profiles,…
October 9, 2020