Security News > 2020 > May > Nearly a million WordPress sites targeted in extensive attacks

"While our records show that this threat actor may have sent out a smaller volume of attacks in the past, it's only in the past few days that they've truly ramped up, to the point where more than 20 million attacks were attempted against more than half a million individual sites on May 3, 2020," Wordfence analysts discovered.

"Over the course of the past month in total, we've detected over 24,000 distinct IP addresses sending requests matching these attacks to over 900,000 sites."

The group has an obvious predilection for older cross-site scripting and options update vulnerabilities in less popular WordPress plugins and themes such as Easy2Map, Blog Designer, WP GDPR Compliance, Total Donations, and the Newspaper theme.

Some of the targeted plugins have also been removed from online plugin repositories, including WordPress' official one.

"The vast majority of these attacks are targeted at vulnerabilities that were patched months or years ago, and in plugins that don't have a large number of users. While we did not see any attacks that would be effective against the latest versions of any currently available plugins, running a Web Application Firewall can also help protect your site against any vulnerabilities that might have not yet been patched," Wordfence analysts noted.

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