Massive Hacking Campaign Targets WordPress Websites to Steal Database Credentials

Cybercriminals launched more than 130 million attacks aiming to harvest database credentials from 1.3 million WordPress sites.

In this massive attack campaign, cybercriminals used several plugin and theme vulnerabilities across the WordPress ecosystem.

Security researchers from Wordfence observed the attack, the peak of the attack occurred on May 30, 2020.

Campaign Linked to Previous

Researchers were able to link the campaign with the same threat actor who previously targeting XSS vulnerabilities at a similar scale.

The previous campaign was conducted from 20,000 different IP addresses and the new campaign also using the same IP address.

All the attack targets older vulnerabilities in outdated plugins or themes that let attackers to download files or to export.

With this campaign the threat actor attempting to download wp-config.php file, which is the core that contains the website’s base configuration details, such as database-connection information.

The previous campaign targeted only XSS vulnerabilities whereas the new campaign targets number in outdated plugins or themes. But researchers believe both the attacks carried out by the same threat actor.

By downloading the file attackers can download database credentials and connection information that lets attackers gain access to the site’s database.

The database is the place where all the site contents such as usernames, passwords, posts, pages, and comments, even the website theme, and WordPress configuration settings.

If your website infected by this campaign you can find the entries “containing wp-config.php in the query string that returned a 200 response code,” reads Wordfence blog.

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