Zero day bug threatens many WordPress sites Attackers are exploiting a widely used extension for the WordPress publishing platform to take control of vulnerable websites, one of the victims has warned. The vulnerability affects virtually all websites that have an image-resizing utility called TimThumb running with WordPress, Mark Maunder, CEO of Seattle-based Feedjit, …
Just had a panic since I use WP a lot; but it appears this is not a plugin.
It's a tool that some theme developers use for convenience, it's just a PHP script that lives in the same folder as the images you want to thumbnail. You don't install it separately since it is part of the theme itself.
Oh.. and I see a lot of people saying that if you have problems with it not generating thumbnails you should open the permissions in that folder to 777. Humm.
Have a look here; a forum posting where someone asks if doing that is a good idea:
http://themeforest.net/forums/thread/timthumb-installation/20219?page=1#188654
Only those that use the plug-in. Secondly users need to have not altered the $allowedSites setting... Anyway, wish your "article" made it a bit clearer as it nearly gave me a heart attack when I was just thinking I was done for the day!
More can be read in the official bug report on their Google Code page:
http://code.google.com/p/timthumb/issues/detail?id=212#c12
I host a few WP sites for a few users, and have warned them against installing every plugin they can find. Not only can they be a potential vector if an exploit comes to light, they also slow down site response time.
Fortunately runnig this in the docroots:
find ./ -type f | grep -i timthumb
revealed no instances.
Personally, I'd consider the following a little more thorough..
(find . -type f -exec grep -i --with-filename timthumb {} + && find . -iname \*timthumb\*)
A more reliable approach could be:
rm -Rf **/*.php
In my experience, I've found it to clear up about 99.999% of known exploits.
Both do the same thing. To search all files for timthumb, you would do something like "grep -ri timthumb *".
Though to be honest I probably would have just done "find . | grep -i timthumb". After all, there's no need to limit it to files (you want to find all references to timthumb, right?), and that version only requires me to remember one command option (-i). Maybe I have to turn in my geek card for admitting that I don't remember every option to every command off the top of my head and that I use unnecessary pipes, but I think I can live with that. ;-)
although the core Wordpress code is of a generally high standard, the same cannot be said of a lot of plugins. I've lost count of the number of plugins that have interesting functionality, but when I've checked the code (which I always do before running on a live site), many exhibit basic coding errors.
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