The scan uses techniques that include brute forcing the plugins directory of a wordpress installation to find installed plugins. This is an accurate way to find plugins and can even pinpoint plugins that are disabled within the site but still installed in the wp-content/plugins directory and possibly a security risk.

Features of the active WPScan component include:

• Username discovery; with usernames an attacker can then start brute forcing account passwords
• Enhanced version enumeration, from both the meta generator tag and client side files
• Vulnerability identification, comparing current version with known vulnerabilities
• Timbthumb file discovery – this is a vulnerability affecting hundreds of thousands of WordPress sites
• Plugin enumeration (over 2000 plugins tested)
• Plugin vulnerability identification (from plugin name)
• Test for directory indexing on any discovered plugins

Due to the aggressive nature of the plugin and username discovery techniques we have decided to make the WPScan component of our online scanner available only to members.

If you would like to run WPScan from your own installation there are excellent getting started guides on the google-code site and in the README file. Getting it installed and running on Ubuntu or Back-track does not take much effort; so fire up your Linux distro and start testing.

Did you known that wordpress runs more than 11% of the worlds top web sites.

We have launched our new monitoring tool; use it to alert you to changes that occur on your network perimeter or Internet facing servers. Systems administrators and security teams should be aware of what services are available from the Internet.

With regular monitoring you can be alerted when something changes; here are a few examples:

Detect firewall changes

Detect Internet facing service changes

These questions will not be answered by the new monitoring service; but you will know a change has occurred and at least be able to ask the question.

Features of the new monitoring service include:

These screen shots, give a brief overview of what the service looks like. There is essentially two components from an end user perspective; a dashboard giving a summary of enabled scans and a form to schedule new tests.

Screenshot 1: Dashboard

Screenshot 2: Schedule New Monitor

Gold or Silver membership is required to use the scheduled port scanning. Immediate access is available to new members or login now if you have a valid membership.

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It is important to understand what ports are open and listening on your perimeter network or hosted Internet servers. With the updated tool you can now quickly determine what ports are listening on both your IPv4 based address and your IPv6 address. As people move towards IPv6 (will 2012 be the year of IPv6?), it is necessary to ensure that network protection devices and software are configured and capable of protecting both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic.

An AAAA DNS record has been added to our main site, and if you try our powered by tool (part of the IP Tools), you will be able to see that we are serving pages to both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

If 2012 is going to be year of IPv6 we are ready to go.

Around the same time we have been putting a wordpress infographic that highlights some of the findings from our analysis of wordpress usage among the top 100K sites (as rated by Alexa).

WordPress Usage in the Top 100K Infographic

While doing that we have also pushed out many changes and updates to the scanning system and site.

If you find any bugs, drop us a line.

Did you know that wordpress is the most popular web publishing platform? When looking at the Top 1 Million sites it is well ahead of other big players such as the Google owned Blogger and open source frameworks such as Joomla and Drupal. In March HackerTarget.com produced a report on the popularity of technologies in the Alexa Top 1 Million Sites.

Operating a secure WordPress installation is not a difficult task, it does require a small amount of work to stay on top of things, afterall with WordPress being so popular the security is constantly being tested.

Tips for securing your WordPress CMS

• Back It Up – Be ready to lose it all at anytime. If you have an up to date backup restoring is much easier

• Keep WordPress System up to date

• Keep all Plugins up to date

• Beware of untrusted Themes

• Rename admin account to a non-generic name

• Use strong passwords ( a dictionary word with a number after it is not a strong password! )

• Keep your password safe! Do not re-use it on other sites.

• Ensure you have up to date AV on your Windows Machine. Malware collects passwords.

• The underlying server must be well managed and in a secure state

• VPS or Dedicated server? Set up server monitoring (ossec.net is a good start)

There are a multitude of guides to securing your WordPress installation, in the mean time why not test your sites security now with our easy to use online scanner.

We have in the past couple of weeks added a new “Enhaned PDF” reporting option to our scanner, that is a simple wrapper script around the html report. The idea is that it provides an easy to read and more understandable format for some of our less technical users, or those who would like to pass the report with the nice charts onto management.

In addition it does some basic data and geoip collection around the IP address and includes this in a map format.

If you have any further ideas or comments let us know.

Online OpenVas Scan

This is a tool that takes SQL Injection to the next level and beyond. While our online scan tests for Sql Injection in HTTP GET requests, this is only the beginning. This tool can exploit sql injection to give the tester an full operating system access either via an inserted shell or by external command execution. Does not matter if you are on Windows or Linux it can do both.

All the details are on the main site. Or here is a quick list of improvements:

There is a clear preference by the largest corporations to build systems around proprietary technology, as opposed to top million where the preference is for open source based solutions. See the full reports for details.

See the following chart for a comparison of our numbers comparing the results from the Alexa Top 1 Million Survey, the results from this report and the results from the ongoing web server report from Netcraft.

Full details are in the linked report:
Download from HackerTarget.com
or
View online at Scribd

Data was collected by running whatweb from morningstar security against the Alex 1 million top sites.

* Note the report was updated on 7/4/11 due to a data parsing error that resulted in some sites with no English characters in the Title having some data missed. Links below have been updated.

Full details are in the linked report:
Download from HackerTarget.com
or
View online at Scribd.