Hackers scan WordPress sites with Epsilon Framework themes installed on more than 150.000 sites and are vulnerable to attacks Function Injection that could lead to full access to websites.
“To date, we have seen an increase of more than 7,5 million attacks against more than 1,5 million sites targeting these vulnerabilities, coming from over 18.000 IP addresses,” said Wordfence QA engineer and threat analyst Ram Gall.
Scan for vulnerable sites
The ongoing large wave of attacks against vulnerable WordPress sites, targets recently fixed vulnerabilities.
While security vulnerabilities identified in recent months in issues using the Epsilon Framework could allow sites to be accessed through a remote code execution (RCE) exploit chain, most of these ongoing attacks are designed to detect only vulnerabilities.
“We are not providing additional details about the attacks at this time, as the exploit it doesn't seem to be in a mature state yet, and a large number of IP addresses are being used," Gall added.
"These attacks use POST requests on admin-ajax.php and therefore do not leave separate log entries, although they will be visible in Wordfence Live Traffic."
Vulnerable theme editions
These targeted theme versions of Epsilon Framework are known to be vulnerable to these attacks:
- shapely
- NewsMag
- Activello
- illdy
- Allegiant
- Newspaper
- Pixova Lite
- Brilliance
- MedZone Lite
- Regina lite
- Transcend
- affluent
- Bonkers
- Antreas
- NatureMag Lite
Owners and webmasters running vulnerable versions of these themes are advised to notify an update immediately if available.
If not available information at this time, they should turn to another issue as soon as possible to rule out attacks.
In May, another mass attack campaign targeted some 900.000 WordPress sites in one week, trying to "plant" backdoors or redirect visitors to malicious advertising sites.
One month later, another series of attacks attempted to collect credentials from databases of about 1,3 million pages with WordPress by downloading configuration files.
