Have you ever gone to a site that had an insane amount of pop ups and ads and that redirected you to other webpages so much so that you would find it nearly impossible to leave the webpage that you were currently on? There is a term for this sort of thing, and that term is “malvertising”. It’s a real problem, and it turns out that a plugin that was recently released for WordPress has a vulnerability that could potentially lead to malicious actors putting code into your blog’s front end that could lead to malvertising in the form of incessant pop ups and redirects.
According to WordFence, the vulnerability that hackers could potentially use is a cross-site scripting bug that has been fixed in the latest patches for the plugin, but the fact of the matter is that there are a lot of webmasters that are using older versions of this plugin and these people are the ones that are at risk of having the front ends of their blogs hijacked by malicious actors that are trying to do a wide range of illicit activities.
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According to WordFence, the vulnerability that hackers could potentially use is a cross-site scripting bug that has been fixed in the latest patches for the plugin, but the fact of the matter is that there are a lot of webmasters that are using older versions of this plugin and these people are the ones that are at risk of having the front ends of their blogs hijacked by malicious actors that are trying to do a wide range of illicit activities.
"We believe the attackers are using a small array of compromised sites to perform these attacks in order to conceal the source of their activities.", explained Mikey Veenstra in a blog post.The truly dangerous aspect of this bug is that it could potentially end up leading to unsuspecting visitors of certain sites getting lead to ads for fake products and it could lead to an outbreak of viruses as well as a wide variety of other cyberattacks as well. People that use WordPress need to be educated about the dangers of the plugin that they are currently using so that they can fix it before things start getting out of hand.
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