SoakSoak Malware infected more than 100,000 WordPress Websites

Google blacklisted over 11000 domains that were infected with this SoakSoak malware which redirect user traffic and download malicious payloads on targets.

WordPress is one of the most popular content management system (CMS) with more than 70 million websites on the Internet. For this reason, it is under continuous attack by threat actors that try to exploit flaws in the core application and in the numerous plugins to conduct illegal activities.

The last news of an attack in order of time against the WordPress platforms is a malware attack campaign that has already compromised more than 100,000 websites worldwide and still counting. Last week, Google  blacklisted over 11,000 domains because they were used to serve malware that has been brought by SoakSoak.ru, for this reason, the malicious campaign has been dubbed the ‘SoakSoak Malware’ epidemic.

The security experts at Sucuri firm provided a detailed analysis of the SoakSoak Malware on their blog, explaining that the infections are targeting different platforms despite the greatest number of infections is affected WordPress based websites.

“Our analysis is showing impacts in the order of 100’s of thousands of WordPress specific websites. We cannot confirm the exact vector, but preliminary analysis is showing correlation with the Revslider vulnerability we reported a few months back.” states the post. “The impact seems to be affecting most hosts across the WordPress hosting spectrum. Quick breakdown of the decoding process is available via our PHP Decoder.”

The malware campaign represents a serious menace for the Internet community, in particular for all the websites running on the WordPress CMS and its visitors. Once the victims are infected they are randomly redirected to SoakSoak.ru web pages and the malware is also able to download further malicious payload on the compromised machine.

SoakSoak malware operates by modifying the file located at wp-includes/template-loader.php which causes wp-includes/js/swobject.js to be loaded on every page visited on the website and this “swobject.js” file includes a malicious java encoded script malware.