Recently, more than 100,000 WordPress sites had been affected by an assailable third-party plug-in, and this number is expected to increase further. The open-source WordPress blogging and content management system (CMS) is at heavy risk due to this third-party plug-in; and some of them may not even realize that they are running. Today, thousands of WordPress Websites are, thus, susceptible to exploitation via this malware known as SoakSoak. The Attack It is extremely important to…
As I write this post, there is an on going and highly distributed, global attack on wordpress installations to crack open admin accounts and inject various malicious scripts. To give you a little history, we recently heard from a major law enforcement agency about a massive attack on US financial institutions originating from our servers. We did a detailed analysis of the attack pattern and found out that most of the attack was originating from…
The internet is abuzz with talks of the recent outage faced by Domain Registrar Godaddy. The outage was suspected to be because of a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (commonly known as a DDoS attack) that targeted Godaddy’s DNS servers, affecting several websites as well as email services. (However, a recent statement by Godaddy mentions that it was an internal network error that caused the interruption in services) DDoS attacks are a fairly common occurrence…
A few days ago Microsoft released a Security Advisory (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/2416728.mspx) about a vulnerability which affects all versions of ASP.NET. This vulnerability known as Padding Oracle exploits the way an ASP.NET application handles encrypted data. ASP.NET encrypts data to prevent an application from tampering with it. Because of this vulnerability, an attacker can send data to a site and analyze the error response which provides a lot of information enabling the attacker to break the ASP.NET’s…