Last month, while working on a WordPress cleanup case, a customer reached out with a strange complaint: their website looked completely normal to them and their visitors, but Google search results were showing something very different.

Instead of normal titles and descriptions, Google was displaying casino and gambling-related content. We have been seeing rising cases of spam on WordPress websites. What made this even more confusing was where the spam was appearing.

Continue reading Shadow Directories: A Unique Method to Hijack WordPress Permalinks at Sucuri Blog.

Some attackers are increasingly moving away from simple redirects in favor of more “selective” methods of payload delivery. This approach filters out regular human visitors, allowing attackers to serve malicious content to search engine crawlers while remaining invisible to the website owner.

What did we find?

During a malware investigation, we identified a selective content injection attack inside the main index.php file of a WordPress website.

Instead of always loading WordPress normally, this modified file checks who is visiting the site.

Continue reading Malware Intercepts Googlebot via IP-Verified Conditional Logic at Sucuri Blog.

During a recent investigation, we discovered a sophisticated WordPress backdoor hidden in what appears to be a JavaScript data file. This malware automatically logs attackers into administrator accounts without requiring any credentials.

In September, we published an article showcasing another WordPress backdoor that creates admin accounts. This new variant takes a different approach by hijacking existing administrator sessions instead of creating new accounts, making it harder to detect through user audits.

What turned up during our review

The file was disguised as a JavaScript asset in a PHP file located in the WordPress admin wp-admin/js directory, but it was really all PHP.

Continue reading WordPress Auto-Login Backdoor Disguised as JavaScript Data File at Sucuri Blog.