High Traffic + High Vulnerability = an Attractive Target for Criminals: The Dangers of Viewing Clickbait Sites
Summary: Since the end of August 2023, Unit 42 observed a significant rise in compromised servers hosting clickbait and ad content, and found approximately 10,300 compromised WordPress sites over a two-month period tied to exploitation of CVE-2023-3169, a tagDiv Newspaper and Newsmag theme vulnerability published by MITRE on Sept. 11, 2023. Clickbait and ad sites accounted for over 30% of those detections, and of that share at least 80% used tagDiv's Newspaper theme with an additional 6% on Newsmag.
Bottom line: A case study of 1,600 randomly selected WordPress sites found a nearly three-to-one ratio of compromised clickbait and ad sites compared with other categories, so the ad-laden pages employees click through are the likeliest compromised hosts your users will reach.
Read the original at Unit 42 Palo Alto Networks ↗
- Topics
- Vulnerabilities & Patching
- Mentions
- CVE-2023-3169
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