As many as 1.6 million WordPress sites have been targeted by an active large-scale attack campaign originating from 16,000 IP addresses by exploiting weaknesses in four plugins and 15 Epsilon Framework themes.
WordPress security company Wordfence, which disclosed details of the attacks, said Thursday it had detected and blocked more than 13.7 million attacks aimed at the plugins and themes in a period of 36 hours with the goal of taking over the websites and carrying out malicious actions.
Most of the attacks observed by Wordfence involve the adversary updating the “users_can_register” (i.e., anyone can register) option to enabled and setting the “default_role” setting (i.e., the default role of users who register at the blog) to administrator, thereby allowing an adversary to register on the vulnerable sites as a privileged user and seize control.
