Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

A WordPress plugin used on over 300,000 websites has been found to contain vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to seize control. Security researchers at Wordfence found two critical flaws in the POST SMTP Mailer plugin. The first flaw made it possible for attackers to reset the plugin's authentication API key and view sensitive logs (including password reset emails) on the affected website. A malicious hacker exploiting the flaw could access the key after triggering a password reset.

43% of all websites are built in WordPress (W3Techs). Custom WordPress sites rely on plugins, themes, and other components determined by the website administrators. Because these extensible components are often created by third-parties, each custom addition is a potential attack vector that needs to be monitored and updated to maintain a secure website. Website security is a critical aspect of your cybersecurity posture.

A zero-day vulnerability, denoted by the CVE identifier CVE-2023-30777, exposes a dangerous reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw. This high-severity vulnerability has been discovered within the WordPress plugin (Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) and Advanced Custom Fields Pro). The CVE-2023-30777 exposes over 2 million installations to security risks, triggering widespread concern and anxiety among website owners and administrators.

Jetpack, an extremely popular WordPress plugin that provides a variety of functions including security features for around five million websites, has received a critical security update following the discovery of a bug that has lurked unnoticed since 2012. Jetpack's maintainers, Automattic, announced on Tuesday that it had worked closely with the WordPress security team to push out an automatic patch for every version of Jetpack since 2.0.

Read also: Microsoft fixes a Windows zero-day, the US sanctions Iranian hackers linked to ransomware attacks, and more.

A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. For a daily selection see our twitter feed at #ionCube24. Shame those mostly likely to be impacted won’t upgrade if they are still on ancient WordPress installs…

When Algolia’s security program manager Regina Bluman ran a Twitter poll to see how many people within the security industry understood the concept of EASM, she didn’t expect that the term is far from being on an IT security team’s radar. Moreover, most were not even aware of it.

The Sysdig Security Research team has identified a Cryptominer attack hitting a Kubernetes pod running WordPress, related to the recent Botnet Sysrv-Hello. The goals of the attack were to control the pod, mine cryptocurrency, and replicate itself from the compromised system. In particular, the attackers targeted a misconfigured WordPress to perform initial access.