Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a massive campaign injects malicious JavaScript code into compromised WordPress websites that scams the users by redirecting visitors to commercial websites to generate illegitimate traffic.
As outlined in securi’s latest hacked website report, Securi has been tracking a long-lasting campaign responsible for injecting malicious scripts into compromised WordPress websites. This campaign leverages known vulnerabilities in WordPress themes and plugins and has impacted an enormous number of websites over the year — for example, according to PublicWWW, the April wave for this campaign was responsible for nearly 6,000 infected websites alone.
Malicious Chain of Redirects
To accomplish these redirects, the malicious injection creates a new script element with the legendarytable[.]com domain as the source.
The code from the legendarytable[.]com domain then calls to a second external domain — local[.]drakefollow[.]com — which calls from links[.]drakefollow[.]com, redirecting the site visitor to one of many different domains including:
- bluestringline[.]com
- browntouchmysky[.]com
- redstringline[.]com
- whitetouchmysky[.]com
- gregoryfavorite[.]space
- gregoryfavorite[.]top
- pushnow[.]net/
At this point, it’s a free for all. Domains at the end of the redirect chain may be used to load advertisements, phishing pages, malware, or even more redirects.
From a site visitor’s perspective, they’ll simply see the following malware page before landing on the final destination.
This page tricks unsuspecting users into subscribing to push notifications from the malicious site. If they click on the fake CAPTCHA, they’ll be opted in to receive unwanted ads even when the site isn’t open — and ads will look like they come from the operating system, not from a browser.
These sneaky push notification opt-in maneuvers also happen to be one of the most common ways attackers display “tech support” scams, which inform users that their computer is infected or slow and they should call a toll-free number to fix the problem.
Detecting Malicious JavaScript
Client-side redirects are initiated by the site visitors’ browser once the infected web page has been loaded. Since this particular infection is found client-side, remote website scanners like SiteCheck can help scan a website and identify this malware.
Here’s an example of a SiteCheck results page for this specific campaign.
Endnote & Mitigation Steps
It has been found that attackers are targeting multiple vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins and themes to compromise the website and inject their malicious scripts. We expect the hackers will continue registering new domains for this ongoing campaign as soon as existing ones become blacklisted.
If you believe that your website has been infected with malicious JavaScript or you have found unwanted redirects to spam or ads on your site, you can use free remote website scanner to detect the malware.
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