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Internal testing begins.Ġ5:58 PM – After rigorous internal testing, and sending a patched version to WordPress for review, the new version of Social Warfare (3.5.3) is released.Ġ6:04 PM – Email to all Social Warfare – Pro customers is sent with details of the vulnerability, and instructions on how to update immediately.
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Attacks on unsuspecting websites begin almost immediately.Ġ2:59 PM – WordPress discovers the publication of the vulnerability, removes Social Warfare from the repository, and emails our team about the issue.Ġ3:07 PM – In a responsible, respectable way, WordFence publishes their discovery of the publication and vulnerability, giving no details about how to take advantage of the exploit.Ġ3:43 PM – Every member of the Warfare Plugins team is brought up to speed, given tactical instructions, and begins taking action on the situation in each respective area: development, communications, and customer support.Ġ4:21 PM – A notice saying that we are aware of exploit, along with instructions to disable the plugin until patched, was posted to Twitter as well as to our website.Ġ5:37 PM – Warfare Plugins development team makes final code commits to patch the vulnerability and undo any malicious script injection that was causing sites to be redirected. We don't know the exact time of the release because the individual has hidden the publishing time.
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"Our current disclosure policy is to full disclose vulnerabilities and then to try to notify the developer through the WordPress Support Forum, though the moderators there… too often just delete those messages and not inform anyone about that," the author wrote in an email.Īccording to a blog post Social Warfare developer Warfare Plugins published Thursday, here's the timeline for March 21, when Plugin Vulnerabilities dropped the zeroday for that plugin:Ġ2:30 PM (approx.) – An unnamed individual published the exploit for hackers to take advantage of. There were no reports of exploits of any of the vulnerabilities prior to the disclosures.Īll three of Plugin Vulnerabilities' zeroday posts came with boilerplate language that said the unnamed author was publishing them to protest "the moderators of the WordPress Support Forum's continued inappropriate behavior." The author told Ars that s/he only tried to notify developers after the zerodays were already published. It took 11 days after Plugin Vulnerabilities dropped the Yuzo Related Posts zeroday for in-the-wild exploits to be reported. Within hours of Plugin Vulnerabilities publishing the Yellow Pencil Visual Theme and Social Warfare disclosures, the zeroday vulnerabilities were actively exploited. Indeed, some of the code used in the attacks appeared to have been copied and pasted from the Plugin Vulnerabilities posts. The posts included enough proof-of-concept exploit code and other technical details to make it trivial to hack vulnerable sites.

In all three cases, the exploits came after a site called Plugin Vulnerabilities published detailed disclosures on the underlying vulnerabilities. Developers for that plugin quickly patched the flaw but not before sites that used it were hacked.Īll three waves of exploits caused sites that used the vulnerable plugins to surreptitiously redirect visitors to sites pushing tech-support scams and other forms of online graft. At the time this post was being reported, Yuzo Related Posts remained closed with no patch available.įurther Reading Two serious WordPress plugin vulnerabilities are being exploited in the wildIn-the-wild exploits against Social Warfare, a plugin used by 70,000 sites, started three weeks ago.

On Friday (three days after the vulnerability was disclosed), Yellow Pencil issued a patch.

Both plugins were removed from the WordPress plugin repository around the time the zeroday posts were published, leaving websites little choice than to remove the plugins. Over the past week, zeroday vulnerabilities in both the Yuzo Related Posts and Yellow Pencil Visual Theme Customizer WordPress plugins-used by 60,000 and 30,000 websites respectively-have come under attack. A self-proclaimed security provider who publicly disclosed the flaws before patches were available played a key role in the debacle, although delays by plugin developers and site administrators in publishing and installing patches have also contributed. Over the past three weeks, a trio of critical zeroday vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins has exposed 160,000 websites to attacks that allow criminal hackers to redirect unwitting visitors to malicious destinations.
