I was contacted by another site owner who was hacked via vulnerable WordPress themes today. He had updated to the latest non-vulnerable version of his theme, but the WordPress theme installation or update process doesn’t remove, or remind you to remove, old themes that may be vulnerable. So while they encourage you to update everything, old versions are still lurking on your site waiting for an attacker to take advantage of them.
Remember: Delete all old unused themes and plugins.
In this case an attacker once again used an old version of timthumb to install an attack shell called Sniper_SA. The attack shell was Arabic so I’m assuming the attack came from an Arabic country. [The last 3 I’ve seen were english]. This one was base64 encoded inside a PHP eval.
The web host is one of the top 3 WordPress.org hosts on the web. Their default installation is to have your entire WordPress installation writeable by the web server and the server can even write to your home directory under the web root. This opens up all sorts of possibilities for a hacker to gain a remote shell. WordPress hosts, please secure your default WordPress installations so that only directories under wp-content/ are writeable. Also make sure the user’s home directory is not writeable by the web server by default.
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