Think Like a Hacker with Wordfence

Latest Episodes:

Episode 105: The Hottest Trend in WordPress Feb 19, 2021

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An analysis of WordPress-related search trends found that interest in WooCommerce related results dominated during 2020. We discuss recent vulnerabilities discovered by our threat intelligence team in Ninja Forms, affecting over 1 million sites. WordPress issues a statement that pirated themes and plugins are prohibited on the repository. And a supply chain attack affects users of the once-legitimate Barcode Scanner Android app. We also discuss some career opportunities on the Wordfence team.

Episode 104: Cryptography Demystified Feb 12, 2021

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This week, the Wordfence team discusses cryptography in-depth, including the basics, a brief history, hashing, and the Crypto Wars. We also go over current news, including 2 new findings by the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team, a new milestone for WordPress, and a recent attack on a Florida Town's water supply.

Episode 103: Wordfence Innovates with Machine Learning and Security for Schools Feb 05, 2021

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Wordfence opens the K-12 site audit and site cleaning service for public schools worldwide. Machine learning is now a big part of our malware identification process, which will speed new malware signatures to deployment for WordPress sites protected by Wordfence. A bug in Sudo can let attackers with access to a local system to elevate their access to a root-level account, which has implications for WordPress sites, Mac users, and many Internet of Things devices. WordPress 5.7, the next major release, will make it much easier for users to migrate their sites from HTTP to HTTPS.

Episode 102: Disruption Presents Opportunity Jan 29, 2021

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After a disruptive year in 2020, there are new challenges in 2021, but also immense opportunities in numerous fields. In a deep and wide-ranging conversation, Mark Maunder and Kathy Zant discuss artificial intelligence, whether or not we're living in simulation, cryptocurrencies and the opportunities of blockchain technology, open source communities and publishing, avoiding scams and FOMO, as well as what fields are most promising for the next 10 years.

Episode 101: Supporting Remote Students with Free Site Audits & Cleanings Jan 22, 2021

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Wordfence announced a new program offering free site cleaning and site audits to public schools in the United States. We talk about why we're offering this program and how to help schools take advantage of it. We also talk about the growing prevalence of WordPress as a content management system and how the incoming administration is using WordPress. We also talk about an unpatched Windows 10 denial of service vulnerability, a breach affecting over 1.9 million Pixlr users, and phishing kits exposing stolen passwords via Google search.

Episode 100: How to Lose 6 Figures the Easy Way Jan 15, 2021

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The recent SolarWinds attack was incredibly sophisticated. What happens when that level of sophistication targets a homebuyer during one of the largest transactions of their lifetime? On this episode, we tell the story of an extremely difficult to detect spearphishing attack that almost cost a homebuyer a significant amount. From this story, we review the warning signs and steps you can take to protect against real estate wire transfer fraud.

Episode 99: SolarWinds Supply Chain Attack Affects Government and Fortune 500 Businesses Dec 18, 2020

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Earlier this week, we learned that SolarWinds, the largest provider of network management tools for large enterprise organizations fell victim to a supply chain attack. This attack affected their Orion network management system. Reportedly, 18,000 enterprise and government customers downloaded and installed malware that was digitally signed by a valid certificate as part of an update from SolarWinds' own servers. Microsoft took control of one of the primary command-and-control domains. We also talk about a vulnerability in the PageLayer plugin and a wormable zero-click XSS bug found in the Jabber client.

Episode 98: How Application Passwords Work in WordPress 5.6 Dec 11, 2020

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WordPress 5.6 was released this week with a new feature called application passwords. In this episode we talk about how application passwords work, where to find them in your WordPress installation, and why Wordfence decided to turn these off by default in version 7.4.14. We also talk about a new Magecart attack that places card skimmers inside of CSS files, MailPoet joining WooCommerce and what this means for eCommerce on WordPress sites. FireEye, one of the largest security firms, reported they were hacked by a nation state APT group, and a wormable zero-click vulnerability was found in Microsoft Teams.

Episode 97: The Future of WordPress with PHP 8 and WordPress 5.6 Dec 04, 2020

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With WordPress 5.6's imminent release and the recent release of PHP 8, we talk about the rapid changes affecting the future of WordPress with new security features and new functionality available to both WordPress users and developers. We also review a recent vulnerability found in iPhones and a social engineering attack on GoDaddy that targeted numerous cryptocurrency exchange sites.

Episode 96: Hosting Provider Failures and Incident Response Preparedness Nov 20, 2020

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Two hosting providers experienced outages this week. GoDaddy had a brief outage affecting numerous systems on Tuesday, November 17. Managed.com had an extensive outage due to ransomware that affected all systems. We discuss what types of incident response preparations site owners should consider when events beyond their control occur. We also discuss a large-scale attack targeting themes using the Epsilon Framework, the new head of security at Twitter, and an Android chat app exposing private messages.

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