Ranjita Pai Kasturi, Jonathan Fuller, Yiting Sun, Omar Chabklo, Andres Rodriguez, Jeman Park, and Brendan Saltaformaggio, Georgia Institute of Technology
Modern websites owe most of their aesthetics and functionalities to Content Management Systems (CMS) plugins, which are bought and sold on widely popular marketplaces. Driven by economic incentives, attackers abuse the trust in this economy: selling malware on legitimate marketplaces, pirating popular plugins, and infecting plugins post-deployment. This research studied the evolution of CMS plugins in over 400K production webservers dating back to 2012. We developed YODA, an automated framework to detect malicious plugins and track down their origin. YODA uncovered 47,337 malicious plugins on 24,931 unique websites. Among these, $41.5K had been spent on 3,685 malicious plugins sold on legitimate plugin marketplaces. Pirated plugins cheated developers out of $228K in revenues. Post-deployment attacks infected $834K worth of previously benign plugins with malware. Lastly, YODA informs our remediation efforts, as over 94% of these malicious plugins are still active today.
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author = {Ranjita Pai Kasturi and Jonathan Fuller and Yiting Sun and Omar Chabklo and Andres Rodriguez and Jeman Park and Brendan Saltaformaggio},
title = {Mistrust Plugins You Must: A {Large-Scale} Study Of Malicious Plugins In {WordPress} Marketplaces},
booktitle = {31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 22)},
year = {2022},
isbn = {978-1-939133-31-1},
address = {Boston, MA},
pages = {161--178},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity22/presentation/kasturi},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}