This section describes injection attacks in which malicious content is inserted into WordPress pages.
WordPress Content Injection Attacks
The most common type of WordPress hacking is an injection attack, in which a site’s content or code is partially rewritten to insert malicious content, inducing users who visit the site to take actions not intended by the site’s creator.
Examples of malware injected by hackers to induce unintended user behavior include the following
Users are redirected to another malicious site instead of the page they were trying to view.
Attempts to induce users to download malicious software
Phishing attacks in which an unauthorized page is generated, registered with search engines, and users accidentally access the unauthorized page.
Three types of injection attacks
There are three types of injection attacks.
Code Injection
This is an injection attack that embeds (or controls the output of) a JAVASCRIPT or PHP executable program into an existing page.
Page Injection
This is an attack in which a malicious page itself is placed on the server to trap search engines and force users to access the page.
Content Injection
Content Injection is the insertion of illegal character strings or links into the content of a page (body, header, footer) to misdirect users. In these cases, content is often plugged in to give an SEO advantage.
How do hackers inject malicious code or content into a site?
In order for a hacker to perform an injection attack on a site, it is assumed that the site has already been successfully hacked and that the hacker has access to the database or files on the server that can be rewritten.
Around 80% of all successful hacks are caused by site vulnerabilities or user password vulnerabilities.
Hackers find vulnerabilities in the site, break through them, and then inject malware into files such as the following
wp-config.php index.php wp-blog-header.php
Theme functions.php header.php footer.php single.php
Other plugins and theme settings stored in the database
However, nowadays, the injection is not limited to the above files, but is often performed deep within the hierarchy in a variety of files that are executed each time a WordPress page is displayed.
Finding and Removing Injected Files
There are thousands of WordPress files, and it is very difficult to manually open each and every file to find injections.
A plugin that exhaustively scans WordPress site files with nearly 20,000 injection (malware) detection patterns may be able to find and remove injections.
Free WordPress:Malware Scan & Security Plug-in [Malware and Virus Detection and Removal].
We hope you will use it!
