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There is no way to understate the severity of what Pipdig did. They inserted obfuscated code into a plugin that is included with all their themes (so I guess it’s like a site-specific plugin) that was installed we can presume on thousands of their customer’s websites to DDoS a competitor. The targeted competitor asked Wordfence not to be named so I’m not naming them here although they are still listed in the Jemjabella blog.
The malicious code also had a backdoor with the ability to silently change administrator passwords of Pipdig’s clients at any time, if instructed to using a text file on pipdig’s website.
The malicious code could also wipe a website’s entire database if the file at https://pipdigz.co.uk/p3/id39dqm3c0.txt
contained their website’s url. This may have been used to destroy sites that pipdig found using pirated themes, since their license does not allow re-use or distribution (this is not the norm, obviously, most ready-made theme developers license them under GPL). In any case it is pure evil - who’s to say for example that the authorised website administrator was the one to wrongly install it? Maybe an honest mistake was made.
Another part of the code would search for and replace links to blogerize.com
with Pipdig - this is clearly an attempt at SEO by generating legitimate back-links, as well as stealing traffic directed to this competitor.
Another part of the code would run a dns lookup on the site’s host name, and if found to be hosted by lyricalhost.com
would then phone home to Pipdig, presumably so they could harvest their customers by bringing them across to their own hosting (or sending those customers to a host they are colluding with).
Finally the plugin would deactivate a bunch of other plugins from other developers, including Hello Dolly. I’m not entirely sure why, but could be to artificially create the impression that the newly installed pipdig theme is faster then whatever the client was previously using.
Ramifications?
The plugin was self-hosted. However pipdig does have a number of plugins hosted on wordpress.org.
A simple reactionary measure, that we might see (might not) would be to see pipdig banned permanently from wordpress.org
. But a more pertinent question is this: should plugin updates be allowed only through an official channel? I think that the answer is yes - of course a developer could still program in a backdoor to update from their own server, that’s literally impossible to prevent, and if a theme developer really wanted to they could just put all their code into functions.php instead - however a policy could be made to ensure that anyone found circumventing an official plugin update path would find themselves blacklisted from ClassicPress.
Obviously I’m thinking about the future, when ClassicPress has its own plugin repository, a time when the Wordpress plugin repository would be disabled by default. The level of plugin safety will always be a compromise, it’s unrealistic to expect a team of experts to peer-review each plugin and update before publication, however it’s totally unacceptable to see plugins from an individual or company who were proven to be distributing malware being left up.