TimThumb Attacks: The Scale of Legacy Malware Infections

guest · Aug 30, 2019

TimThumb Attacks: The Scale of Legacy Malware Infections
August 29, 2019
https://blog.sucuri.net/2019/08/timthumb-attacks-the-scale-of-legacy-malware-infections.html

These days, we consider a malware campaign massive if it affects a couple thousand websites. However, back in the day when Sucuri first started its operations, the scale of infections was significantly larger — and it was quite typical to see hundreds of thousands of websites affected by the same malware.
Blast From the WordPress Past: TimThumb Vulnerability
One of the most famous attacks in the WordPress ecosystem during 2011-2014 was the exploitation of the TimThumb vulnerability.
TimThumb was a simple PHP script used for resizing images. A large number of popular WordPress themes and plugins used this script.

[...] hackers can add malicious PHP code at the end of a real image and their code will be executed whenever the file is requested.
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So, why bother even releasing this information in 2019? We’ve compiled this data with the intention of helping you, our reader, appreciate how much more secure the internet has become in the past decade.

More and more researchers review the code of popular CMS’ and their extensions, and practice responsible disclosure which helps to mitigate security problems much faster than a few years ago. Of course, every now and then we still see some massive infections, though they’re not nearly at the scale seen even 5 years ago.
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