Pierluigi Paganini
April 28, 2025
Patchstack researchers uncovered a large-scale phishing campaign targeting WordPress WooCommerce users with a fake security alert. Threat actors urge recipients to download a “critical patch” that hides a backdoor.
The experts noted that this campaign resembled another one the team monitored in December 2023, which sent fake security alerts to WordPress users. The emails warned of a supposed ‘Remote Code Execution (RCE)’ vulnerability, CVE-2023-45124, and urged users to install a fake patch allegedly from the WordPress team.
The latest phishing wave likely involves the same threat actor or a group closely mimicking previous attacks, based on similarities in tactics and techniques to conceal the malicious code.
Attackers warn the recipients that their websites are impacted by a (nonexistent) “Unauthenticated Administrative Access” vulnerability, and they urge them to visit their phishing website, which uses an IDN homograph attack to disguise itself as the official WooCommerce website.
“Once you click on the Download Patch button in the email, you are directed to a fake WooCommerce Marketplace page” reads the Patchstack’s report. “This page is served through, at least, the malicious domain name woocommėrce[.]com (Note the ė in this domain, making it very similar to the official WooCommerce domain).”
After downloading the fake patch, users received a zip file named authbypass-update-31297-id.zip, which behaved like a regular plugin during installation. Once activated, the plugin silently leveraged legitimate WordPress hooks to mask its activities. It immediately added a hidden WP Cron job running every minute to create a new, hidden administrator account and send the credentials to an attacker-controlled server. It also contacted another server to download and install several obfuscated PHP web shells (such as P.A.S.-Fork, p0wny, and WSO) into the website’s uploads folder. These web shells gave attackers full control of the server, enabling activities like injecting ads, redirecting visitors, stealing billing data, launching DDoS attacks, or conducting ransomware operations. The plugin also hid itself and the rogue admin account to evade detection, mirroring tactics seen in previous “Fake CVE” phishing campaigns.
The researchers shared indicators of compromise for this campaign, including a new user account featuring a random-looking, 8-character username. Investigators also observed an unusual cronjob, such as one named mergeCreator655. In the file system, a suspicious folder named authbypass-update appears inside the wp-content/plugins/ directory, while another folder with a format like wp-cached-<random8chars> shows up under wp-content/uploads/. Additionally, the compromised site generates outbound HTTP requests to attacker-controlled domains, including woocommerce-services[.]com, woocommerce-api[.]com, and woocommerce-help[.]com.
“As this phishing campaign is discovered and the community is made aware, it is likely for some or all of these indicators to change. New versions of this campaign are likely to appear as domains get flagged by hosts, registrars and security services.” concludes the report.
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