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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Fnord666:

Hackers exploit critical vulnerability found in ~100,000 WordPress sites:

Hackers are actively exploiting a critical WordPress plugin vulnerability that allows them to completely wipe all website databases and, in some cases, seize complete control of affected sites.

The flaw is in the ThemeGrill Demo Importer installed on some 100,000 sites, and it was disclosed over the weekend by Website security company WebARX. By Tuesday, WebArx reported that the flaw was under active exploit with almost 17,000 attacks blocked so far. Hanno Böck, a journalist who works for Golem.de, also spotted active attacks and reported them on Twitter.

"There's currently a severe vuln in a wordpress plugin called "themegrill demo importer" that resets the whole database," Böck wrote. "https://webarxsecurity.com/critical-issue-in-themegrill-demo-importer/ It seems attacks are starting: Some of the affected webpages show a wordpress 'hello world'-post. /cc If you use this plugin and your webpage hasn't been deleted yet consider yourself lucky. And remove the plugin. (Yes, remove it, don't just update.)"

[...] The bug stems from a failure to authenticate users before allowing them to carry out privileged administrative commands. Hackers can abuse this failure by sending Web requests that contain specially crafted text strings.

"This is a serious vulnerability and can cause a significant amount of damage," WebARX researchers wrote in this weekend's disclosure. "Since it requires no suspicious-looking payload just like our previous finding in InfiniteWP, it is not expected for any firewall to block this by default, and a special rule needs to be created to block this vulnerability."

Specifically, the vulnerability allows attackers to delete all tables and populate the database with default settings and data. Accounts named "admin," assuming any exist, are set to their previously known password. In the event accounts named admin exist, the attacker will find themselves logged in with administrative rights.

Original Submission