November 15, 2022
Hackers have launched a new malicious black hat search engine optimization (SEO) campaign that compromised over 15,000 WordPress websites to redirect visitors to fake Q&A portals.
Each compromised page contains approximately 20,000 files used in the search engine spam campaign, with WordPress being the most commonly used platform.
The attack aims to promote a handful of low-quality fake websites that use similar website creation templates and operate from the same threat scenario.
The hackers are able to modify an average of over 100 files per website, which is in stark contrast to other attacks of this kind, in which only a small number of files are manipulated to reduce the space required and avoid detection.
Wp-signup.php, wp-cron.php, wp-links-opml.php, wp-settings.php, wp-comments-post.php, wp-mail.php, xmlrpc.php, wp-activate.php, wp-trackback.php, and wp-blog-header.php are some of the most frequently infected pages.
The campaign prepares these pages for future use as malware droppers or phishing sites, as even a short-term operation on Google’s first page would lead to a large number of infections. Infected or injected files contain malicious code that checks if website visitors are logged into WordPress and redirects them to the https://ois.is/images/logo-6.png URL if they are not.
The sources for this piece include an article in TheHackerNews.
