A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. For a daily selection see our twitter feed at #ionCube24. Shame those mostly likely to be impacted won’t upgrade if they are still on ancient WordPress installs…

When Algolia’s security program manager Regina Bluman ran a Twitter poll to see how many people within the security industry understood the concept of EASM, she didn’t expect that the term is far from being on an IT security team’s radar. Moreover, most were not even aware of it.

The Sysdig Security Research team has identified a Cryptominer attack hitting a Kubernetes pod running WordPress, related to the recent Botnet Sysrv-Hello. The goals of the attack were to control the pod, mine cryptocurrency, and replicate itself from the compromised system. In particular, the attackers targeted a misconfigured WordPress to perform initial access.

Trustwave SpiderLabs recently undertook a survey of some 100 popular WordPress plugins for possible SQL Injection vulnerabilities. Some good news is that in the vast majority, no such vulnerabilities were identified. Most plugins were found to be using either prepared statements or suitable sanitization when incorporating user-controlled data in a query.

On November 6th, 2019, Detectify added security tests for 50+ of the most popular WordPress plugins, including Easy-WP-SMTP. Although the zero-day affecting Easy-WP-SMTP (CVE-2020-35234) was recently patched, WordPress estimates that many of the 500,000+ active installs of the plugin remain unpatched. Detectify scans your applications for this vulnerability and alerts you if you are running a vulnerable version of WordPress and WordPress plugins.

Loginizer, a popular plugin for protecting WordPress blogs from brute force attacks, has been found to contain its own severe vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers. The flaw, discovered by vulnerability researcher Slavco Mihajloski, opened up opportunities for cybercriminals to completely compromise WordPress sites. The flaw can be exploited if a user attempts to log into a Loginizer-protected website with a carefully-crafted username.

Sebastian Neef (@gehaxelt) is a IT security freelancer and a top contributor from the Detectify Crowdsource community. In this guest blog, he looks at ways WordPress plugins leak sensitive data in the wild: The OWASP Top 10 puts Sensitive Data Exposure on the 3rd place of the most common web security issues. In this blog post we will have a look at sensitive data exposure that you might not be aware of.