{"id":34840,"date":"2020-05-07T15:13:55","date_gmt":"2020-05-07T15:13:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/packetstormsecurity.com\/news\/view\/31187\/900-000-WordPress-Sites-Attacked-Via-XSS-Vulnerabilities.html"},"modified":"2020-05-07T15:13:55","modified_gmt":"2020-05-07T15:13:55","slug":"900000-wordpress-sites-attacked-via-xss-vulnerabilities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.threatshub.org\/blog\/900000-wordpress-sites-attacked-via-xss-vulnerabilities\/","title":{"rendered":"900,000 WordPress Sites Attacked Via XSS Vulnerabilities"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wysiwyg\">\n<p>Nearly 1 million WordPress sites are being hit by what is likely a single threat actor attempting to inject a redirect into the sites by exploiting a cross site scripting vulnerability.<\/p>\n<p>The attacks were discovered by the WordFence Threat Intelligence Team, which <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wordfence.com\/blog\/2020\/05\/nearly-a-million-wp-sites-targeted-in-large-scale-attacks\/\">noted<\/a> that since April 28 the number of XSS attacks has been 30 times its normal rate. The team believes a single actor is behind the attacks based on the fact that the same payload is used in each attack. The payload is a malicious JavaScript that redirects visitors and takes advantage of an administrator\u2019s session to insert a backdoor into the theme\u2019s header.<\/p>\n<p>Ameet Naik, security evangelist at PerimeterX, noted that an XSS attack, while being used for a redirect here, can lead to more serious issues.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAttackers can use XSS vulnerabilities to gain privileged access to a website and plant malicious JavaScript code that can steal user data, spread malware or hijack users to nefarious sites. Such techniques have been used to launch Magecart attacks against thousands of e-commerce sites resulting in the theft of millions of credit card numbers,\u201d he told SC Media.<\/p>\n<p>The scale of the attacks is staggering. WordFence believes the malicious actor may have launched a few small-scale attacks before April 28 ,but has since massively increased the number of incidents with 20 million attacks attempted against more than 500,000 individual sites on May 3 alone.<\/p>\n<p>WordPress plugins have been the focus of many <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scmagazine.com\/?s=wordpress&amp;orderby=date&amp;order=desc\">attacks<\/a>, but this campaign is by far the largest spotted.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOver the course of the past month in total, we\u2019ve detected over 24,000 distinct IP addresses sending requests matching these attacks to over 900,000 sites,\u201d the team reported.<\/p>\n<p>The attacks are targeting five WordPress plugins \u2014 some of which have been discontinued, but are still in use by certain site operators \u2014 with vulnerabilities that may have not yet been patched by users. These include an XSS vulnerability in Easy2Map, a plugin with only 3,000 installs, which was pulled from the WordPress repository in August 2019, but was the focus of about half of the current attacks. Also targeted was an options update vulnerability in the plugin Total Donations, which was removed from the Envato Marketplace in early 2019.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<section class=\"post-tags\">\n<h2>Topics:<\/h2>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.scmagazine.com\/tag\/social-media\/\" class=\"button -secondary\">Social Media<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scmagazine.com\/tag\/vulnerabilities\/\" class=\"button -secondary\">Vulnerabilities<\/a><\/section>\n<p>READ MORE <a href=\"https:\/\/packetstormsecurity.com\/news\/view\/31187\/900-000-WordPress-Sites-Attacked-Via-XSS-Vulnerabilities.html\">HERE<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>READ MORE HERE&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[277],"tags":[6493],"class_list":["post-34840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cybersecurity-blogs","tag-headlinehackerflawwordpress"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>900,000 WordPress Sites Attacked Via XSS Vulnerabilities 2026 | ThreatsHub Cybersecurity News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"ThreatsHub Cybersecurity News | ThreatsHub.org | Cloud Security &amp; Cyber Threats Analysis Hub. 100% Free OSINT Threat Intelligent and Cybersecurity News.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link 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