One of the most unusual strategies cybercriminals use to deliver phishing and malware to unsuspecting users is compromising valid websites, including those hosted on WordPress, to house their very own malicious content without cost.
The URLs of compromised sites used for phishing assaults target customers via unsolicited emails, allowing safety specialists to track their extent. In 2016, in keeping with an Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) document, phishing assault campaigns shattered all previous years’ data, which the firm started monitoring in 2004. The report found that phishing websites peaked at 158,988 in April 2016, and a wide variety of attacks continue to develop year over year. Once hijacked, the same website may be used to serve malware.
There are ways to defend users from email-borne attacks, but to make the net safer from folks that perpetrate them, we must reduce the delivery chain even earlier. On the seller side, quicker detection can make certain that affected websites are flagged on time to save you, users, from accessing them, for this reason, foiling the attacker’s plans. On the website side, administrators should prioritize applying simple safety practices to make their sites safer. Users should remain cautious, especially when receiving unsolicited emails and having access to the links or attachments they receive.
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READ THE WHITE PAPER: SHIFTING THE BALANCE OF POWER WITH COGNITIVE FRAUD PREVENTION
Popularity
Attracts Both Good and Bad
When it comes to the lucrative structures, cybercriminals commonly opt for people who cover more floor. That is why the Windows operating system is a primary target for malware, and the Android OS is targeted using over ninety-five percent of all cellular malware. Following that same logic, the WordPress (WP) platform is one of the maximum famous content management systems (CMS) on the net, holding nearly fifty-nine percent of the market share. Therefore, it’s frequently centered on fraudsters.
The platform is easy to use, open-source, and based on PHP and MySQL. WordPress is mounted on a web server and may be used as part of a website hosting service or directly on a network host, making it the choice of many website builders. The sheer quantity of WordPress-based sites makes them natural targets for spammers and cybercriminals who compromise legitimate websites to host their malicious content freely. And on account that so many sites are based on the same code, locating simply one vulnerability can mean compromising the lot of them, an exercise that black-hat hackers observe on any form of platform.
To hold the platform’s safety in the face of such threats, the WP network has been actively updating the codebase to keep each user and website safe. Since its first release in May 2003, a gradual replacement can boost the website’s exposure to old vulnerabilities.
IBM X-Force used facts from its web crawlers to log extraordinary websites to illustrate which code model they used. Our data confirmed that a few of the dated WP versions are still in enormous use.
WordPress Versions Used Figure 1: Relative Number of Websites Hosting Each WP Version as of March 31, 2017 (Source: IBM X-Force)
Minimizing Risk of Compromise
ide. This can mean that a few admins have disabled the automatic replacement feature, even though automation is regarded high-quality safety practice.
The reason this happens is normally convenience. When updates take place without direct motion from the administrator, unexpected and unsupervised tactics might also crash the application or affect a part of its capability, resulting in a tremendous amount of work to evolve the application to a new source code or framework version.
