When looking through WordPress plugins, I noticed that a lot of developers seem to have issues using AJAX securely. They frequently don’t use nonces at all, they leak nonces to people they shouldn’t, and they forget to check the user’s capabilities. At first, going after the low hanging fruit (AJAX issues) of the low hanging fruit (WP plugins) was kind of fun, but it started to get boring pretty fast so I wrote a script to do it for me.
PHP Backdoor Obfuscation Techniques
When an attacker leaves behind malicious PHP after a successful compromise, they typically make some attempt to obfuscate their code. While the title of this post is “PHP Backdoor Obfuscation Techniques”, these methods are also used to obfuscate other code as well, sometimes even in a poor attempt to protect legitimate code from reverse engineering and modification. I’ve been working in an environment with a large number of LAMP servers for several years now, and I’ve seen a lot of malicious PHP. Here are some of the more common (and a few less common) obfuscation techniques I’ve seen.