- Malicious actor purchased 31 WordPress plugins from Essential Plugin
- Updates injected backdoors, provides full site access
- Spam campaigns hidden from owners, C2 solved via Ethereum smart contract
A hacker bought more than 30 legitimate WordPress plugins and abused their good reputation to infect tens of thousands of websites with backdoors.
Austin Ginder, founder of Anchor Hosting, reported how a client recently alerted him to a known plugin suddenly allowing unauthorized third-party access. The investigation led him to a somewhat worrying discovery: a company that developed 31 WordPress plugins, both free and premium versions, was sold in early 2025 to a person who calls himself “Kris”.
This person then added malicious code to all the plugins and pushed the update to the WordPress sites that were actively using them.
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Injects sophisticated code
The malicious company is called Essential Plugin and claims that its products have been installed more than 400,000 times and were actively used by more than 15,000 customers. The official WordPress repository lists more than 20,000 active WordPress installations.
The malware was essentially a backdoor that gave the attacker full access to the websites. The goal appears to have been to propagate existing spam campaigns:
“The injected code was sophisticated,” Ginder explained. “It fetched spam links, redirects and fake pages from a command-and-control server. It only showed spam to Googlebot, making it invisible to website owners. And here’s the wildest part. It resolved its C2 domain through an Ethereum smart contract and queried public blockchain RPC endpoints. Traditional domain attack couldn’t update a new domain attack to update a new domain. at any time.”
The full list of compromised plugins can be found at this link. If you use any of these, it would be wise to replace them with a safer alternative. Ginder also shared a patching method on his blog.
Meanwhile, WordPress removed all the malicious plugins from the repository.
Via TechCrunch
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