Recently we got a spam comment on one of our posts that was meant to provide a link to onehoursitefix.com. The name given with the comment was “how to fix a hacked site” and the comment, which was irrelevant to the post, was:
You might be scratching your head at this point because you are
certainly not sure what tattoo. It is also a classical technique, which started out
for the dancers to seem weightless. s always preferable to let someone
know your location going and which route you.
It probably doesn’t say great things about that website, OneHourSiteFix, that they appear to need to promote themselves in that way, but that turns out to be much less concerning than the blog post we noticed linked to from their homepage.
The title of the post in the title HTML tag is “WordPress Website Defaced ? Due To A Well Known Security Company ?” and the on page title is “WORDPRESS PLUGIN VULNERABILITY MEANS MILLIONS FIND THEIR WORDPRESS WEBSITE DEFACED BY HACKERS”. The post is listed as being put out on June 26, 2017.
The first paragraph seems to be written by someone who has absolutely no idea what they are talking about:
Free open-source website and blog creation tool ‘WordPress’ has left millions of pages defaced, due to a remote code execution (RCE) feature being added to the package. This feature has allowed hackers to take control of pages using WordPress plugins allowing attackers control over editorial features in order to vandalize pages or even worse execute malicious payloads. Plugins are those great bits of extra software you can add to your WordPress site to do everything from show a map of visitors to show a fancy photo gallery. Plugins however, have always been a l known and documented ‘attack vector’ for hackers. An attack vector being ‘a way in’ or path into a website. The end result is millions of site owners have found their WordPress website defaced by hackers.
What it sounds like this person might referring to is a vulnerability that had existed in WordPress 4.7.0 and 4.7.1 that allowed attackers to change the content of posts and was fixed in January. It wasn’t a “remote code execution (RCE) feature” and there hasn’t been something like that added to WordPress. The vulnerability could have had more serious consequences if certain plugins that allow PHP code to be run in posts, which might be what the reference to plugins there is trying to refer to. There was nothing that could remotely be what is described there that happened in June, what did happen in January also doesn’t appear to have impacted millions of websites.
That explanation seems more likely based on the next paragraph (though it again doesn’t make much sense as written):
A well known security firm released a statement saying they had detected multiple hackers seizing control of sites. A backdoor in the protocol allows attackers to inject ads, spam and affiliate links. The security firm expects many more attacks to follow and even advised users to disable the plugins due to attackers using these them to insert malware into any affected website More often than not the old, ‘Hacked By GeNErAL’ ! types of defacement are being replaced by monetising hacks with compromised sites being used to make money for the hacker via the use of paid ads (selling everything from viagra, research chemicals to fake crypto currency exchanges) or redirect them to an ‘online pharmacy’
What is also interesting is that before the security company released the details of the hack, very few WordPress websites had actually been compromised. The timeline in which the hack was detected, details released and then the fix released – does arouse suspicions amongst the conspiracy theorists amongst us.
In March alone, over 45 million of WordPress websites were defaced and infectd. Many websites are still affected with many of their users not even realising that hidden within their blog there is a page that is selling some seedy pharmaceutical product . Often these hacked website pages are only found by using very specific search terms in google so blog owners are blissfully unaware that their sweet and innocent cupcake blog is actually harbouring a deep secret within the blog pages…
Another Very Odd Claim
In looking at their service there is another element that makes it sound like something is very amiss. One part of their service is cleaning up hacked websites and the other is a web application firewall (WAF) that is supposed to stop them from being hacked again. What is missing is the thing that should tie those together, determining how they website got hacked. If you don’t do that you can insure the vulnerability that was exploited has been fixed and the website won’t get hit again. That would also seem important to make a WAF effective.
Instead of doing what would actually prevent the website from being hacked again they make a claim that doesn’t sound believable:
IN ADDITION – our security experts manually analyse EVERY element of your site – every row in your database and every line of your files is checked and cleaned. This layered approach ensures we don’t just throw the hackers off a site – we slam the door on them as well.
That would take a very long time to do on most websites, yet somehow they are also going to fix the website in an hour, and it would likely be very ineffective since the sheer amount of information being reviewed would make it less likely that someone would spot a real issue among everything else.
On the page about their cleanup service there was a linked review that while giving them five-stars and seemed positive, indicated that this person’s websites have been repeatedly hacked:
Always quick, always clean.
OneHourSiteFix staff goes above and beyond everytime we’ve had an issue. Quick service, speedy cleaning, and even making sure sites like Google rank you site as safe again. We can’t thank them enough for keeping our servers from getting shut down by our service provider due to infections/spam. Top notch, our go to company for website cleaning everytime! Need help, look no further!