14 Pharma Hacks MAR 2021 – WP Security Exploits for SEO/DDoS

14 Pharma Hacks MAR 2021

WP Security Exploits for SEO/DDoS

Be informed about the latest WP Security Exploits for SEO gains and DoS/DDoS remote controls, identified and reported publicly. With Pharma Hacks MAR 2021 the consequences of a hack are ugly. You will experience major backlash on your WordPress domain, costly damage control/recovery, immediate revenue loss with long-term consequences. Consider our FREE security AUDIT.

An estimated 504.000+ active WordPress installations are susceptible to these attack types, considering only the publicly available numbers. The estimated number can double with versions already closed due to security concerns.

It is a 75% increase trend compared to February 2022. Read more about our previous report here: 8 Pharma Hacks FEB 2021 – WP Security Exploits for SEO/DDoS. The following cases made headlines PUBLICLY just last month in the Pharma Hacks MAR 2021 category:

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• BuddyPress < 7.2.1 – REST API Privilege Escalation
  • Are you looking for modern, robust, and sophisticated social network software? BuddyPress is a suite of components that are common to a typical social network, and allows for great add-on features through WordPress’s extensive plugin system. Active installations: 200,000+

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• Easy Form Builder <= 1.0 – Authenticated Arbitrary File Upload
  • No known fix – plugin closed

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• Forminator – Contact Form, Payment Form & Custom Form Builder CSRF Nonce Bypasses
  • Not your typical form-making plugin. Forminator is the easy-to-use WordPress form builder plugin for every website and situation. It’s the easiest way to create any form – contact form, order form, payment form, email form, feedback widgets, interactive polls with real-time results, buzzfeed-style “no wrong answer” quizzes, service estimators, and registration forms with payment options including PayPal and Stripe. Active installations: 100,000+

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• Dokan – Best WooCommerce Multivendor Marketplace Solution CSRF Nonce Bypasses
  • Dokan is the best front end multi-vendor marketplace on WordPress, powered by WooCommerce. It helps you to build your own marketplace similar to Amazon, Shopify, eBay, Magento like marketplaces in under 30 minutes. Active installations: 60,000+

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• Defender Security – Malware Scanner, Login Security & Firewall CSRF Nonce Bypasses
  • Defender adds the best in WordPress security plugin to your website with just a few clicks. Stop brute force attacks, SQL injections, cross-site scripting XSS, and other WordPress vulnerabilities and hacks with Defender malware scans, antivirus scans, IP blocking, firewall, activity log, security log, and two-factor authentication login security. Active installations: 50,000+

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• Abandoned Cart Lite for WooCommerce CSRF Nonce Bypasses
  • With the average shopping cart abandonment rate as high as 70%, Abandoned Cart Plugin helps you recover those carts from your WooCommerce shop. Active installations: 30,000+

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• Style Kits – Advanced Theme Styles for Elementor CSRF Nonce Bypasses
  • Style Kits extends the flexibility of Elementor Theme Styles and introduces the first library of Theme-Style-ready template kits and blocks. Active installations: 10,000+

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• WP ERP – Complete WordPress Business Manager with HR, CRM & Accounting Systems for Small Businesses CSRF Nonce Bypasses
  • Get a unique interactive experience of managing your business independently with the most reliable information Storage & system of record on WordPress. WP ERP is the first full-fledged ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system through which you can simultaneously manage your WordPress site and business from a single platform. Active installations: 10,000+

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• WP Project Manager – Project, Task Management & Team Collaboration Software CSRF Nonce Bypasses
  • Being one of the most advanced project management and task management tools for WordPress, WP Project Manager comes with some of the exceptional features that turn your project management experience of your teammates a joyful ride. Super-charge your productivity creating, organizing and assigning tasks within a few clicks. Active installations: 10,000+

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• WP Travel – Best Travel Booking WordPress Plugin, Tour Management Engine
  CSRF Nonce Bypasses
  • WP Travel is a free powerful travel engine for making customized travel agency or tour operator websites on WordPress in minutes! With this SEO-friendly & scalable WordPress travel engine, you can create customized itineraries & travel packages on the fly. Powered with advanced modules, this plugin helps you save hours of development. Compatible with some of the best travel agency WordPress themes, this is the ultimate travel engine for travel and tour management WordPress websites. Active installations: 6,000+

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• N5 Upload Form <= 1.0 – Unauthenticated Arbitrary File Upload to RCE
  • No known fix – plugin closed

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• PhastPress < 1.111 – Open Redirect
  • PhastPress uses advanced techniques to manipulate your pages, scripts, stylesheets and images to significantly improve load times. It’s designed to conform to Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix recommendations and can improve your site’s score dramatically. Active installations: 8,000+

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• The Plus Addons for Elementor Page Builder Lite < 4.1.7 – Authentication Bypass
  • The Plus Addons is made by experienced designers and developers to fulfil all your needs while development of websites. It’s completely responsive, easy to use with tons of options. Which makes this plugin biggest, unique and most advance. Plugin is already used by lots of designers and developers and they have given very positive feedbacks. We keep improving plugin so you have the best available version with latest features as per trends. Active installations: 30,000+

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• WP-Curricul Vitea Free <= 6.3 – Unauthenticated Arbitrary File Upload to RCE
  • Active installations: No known fix – plugin closed

BRIEF: Pharma Hacks MAR 2021 is an SEO spam attack type, where a legitimate website is used to sell illicit drugs. In this type of attack, hackers hijack websites, injects malware and uses that specific domain to sell illicit drugs like Viagra, Cialis, Levitra. This is where it started and got its name.

Today, not just potency drugs are a drive. Anything that created interest from humans, but their local legislation failed to keep up with the latest trends are in this category. Consider this as a modern inquisition, where your domain is the heretic, spreading undesired ideology – sadly unknowingly.

Pharma Hacks Explained

The Pharma Hacks MAR 2021 exploits are used to insert rogue code in outdated versions of WordPress, themes and plugins. This new content inside existing pages and post are causing search engines to return ads for pharmaceutical products after a new indexation. The vulnerability is more of a spam menace than traditional malware but gives search engines enough reason to block the domain for distributing spam (NOT creating, JUST maintaining, harbouring, spreading).

Working parts of a Pharma Hacks MAR 2021 include a backdoor in plugins, themes and databases. However, the exploits are often vicious variants of encrypted malicious injections hidden in databases and require a thorough clean-up process to fix the vulnerability. Nevertheless, you can easily prevent Pharma Hacks by regularly updating your WordPress installations, themes, and plugins.

What is the impact of Pharma Hacks MAR 2021?

The consequences of a hack are ugly. You will experience major backlash on your WordPress domain such as:

– A marked drop in search engine rankings for the keywords you’re targeting;
– High bounce rates as visitors are redirected to different websites;
– Wasted SEO efforts in the future;
– SERP blacklist warnings on your website like:

— This site may be hacked
— Deceptive site ahead etc;
— Hosting account suspensions;
— Email providers blacklisting your domain;
— High cleanup, recovery, damage control costs;
— Major decline in your brand’s image, reputation.

What is Denial of Service (DoS)?

Perhaps the most dangerous of them all, Denial of Service (DoS) is used to overwhelm a specific domain’s hosting resources (memory, CPU, bandwidth, etc). Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled.

Hackers have compromised millions of websites and raked in millions by exploiting outdated and buggy versions of WordPress, themes, plugins and 3rd party connected software. Even the latest versions of WordPress software cannot comprehensively defend against high-profile DoS attacks, but will at least help you to avoid getting caught in the crossfire between financial institutions and sophisticated cybercriminals.

What is Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)?

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is one of the most powerful weapons on the internet. When you hear about a website being “brought down by hackers”, it generally means it has become a victim of a DDoS attack. In short, this means that hackers made that domain unavailable by flooding or crashing the website with too much traffic.

Although financially motivated cybercriminals are less likely to target small companies, they tend to compromise outdated vulnerable websites in creating botnet chains to attack large businesses. The primary way a DDoS is accomplished is through a network of remotely controlled, hacked domains. This is where small businesses come to the crossfire. These are often referred to as zombies, botnets or network of bots. These are used to flood a high profile target.

What is the impact of DoS/DDoS?

Starts with a slow website, with vital parts not working accordingly (checkout, orders/account registration, processing, dispatching). It peaks for a real visitor as page not available. When the entire server crashed, then the domain is unavailable. END GAME.

This is a costly thing to defend in a cloud environment, due to creating more and more servers to serve traffic spike, it burns your hosting budget for an entire year in a few hours. In classical hosting environments, using a single physical machine to host the domain is simply incapable of facing even the most simple, smallest DoS or DDoS attacks.

 

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