Security News > 2021 > September > New Capoae Malware Infiltrates WordPress Sites and Installs Backdoored Plugin

A recently discovered wave of malware attacks has been spotted using a variety of tactics to enslave susceptible machines with easy-to-guess administrative credentials to co-opt them into a network with the goal of illegally mining cryptocurrency.

"The malware's primary tactic is to spread by taking advantage of vulnerable systems and weak administrative credentials. Once they've been infected, these systems are then used to mine cryptocurrency," Akamai security researcher Larry Cashdollar said in a write-up published last week.

The PHP malware - codenamed "Capoae" - is said to be delivered to the hosts via a backdoored addition to a WordPress plugin called "Download-monitor," which gets installed after successfully brute-forcing WordPress admin credentials.

What's more, the attack chain stands out for its persistence tricks, which includes choosing a legitimate-looking system path on the disk where system binaries are likely to be found as well as generating a random six-character filename that's then subsequently used to copy itself into the new location on the system before deleting the malware upon execution.

"The good news is, the same techniques we recommend for most organizations to keep systems and networks secure still apply here."

"Ensure you're keeping those deployed applications up to date with the latest security patches and check in on them from time to time. Keeping an eye out for higher than normal system resource consumption, odd/unexpected running processes, suspicious artifacts and suspicious access log entries, etc., will help you potentially identify compromised machines."

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