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Malware found in official gravityforms plugin indicating supply chain breach
- mpol 1y agoUsing a nonce before checking the form would have prevented much of the problems described. Or stated differently, it would suddenly require lots of manual labour.
- jimjambw 1y agoI’m from a technical background and so I understand this but being a Brit sentences like this are always funny to me
- theglenn88_ 1y agoNot On Normal Courtyard Exercise
- stuartjohnson12 1y agoBasically A Creative Kind of Reverse Origin Naming You Make
- astura 1y agoFor those who didn't understand this comment (like me) Nonce is also British slang for alleged or convicted sex offenders, especially ones involving children.
- 4ndrewl 1y agoMakes some discussions with non-technical stakeholders interesting.
- mijoharas 1y agoI always just call them "n-once" and I read it that way too (which I think is what it comes from right? Number you use once?). At least that way it stops me from making childish jokes.
- MarkusQ 1y agoThat's why you should call them pervs (per-instance values).
- darknavi 1y agoWhy not pedos (pedantic objects)?
- projektfu 1y ago> put nonces on form > all spam, normal traffic gone > received e-mail complaint from sex offender registry because i am downloading too many images
- brewtide 1y agoI was this close to putting it on a car license plate unaware of the British use. I've never been happier to just, check, before clicking a submit button.
- giingyui 1y agoShould say what plugin it is.
- Etheryte 1y agoIt's in the title? It's the official GravityForms plugin, supposedly version 2.9.13 fixes the issue, but the changelog [0] doesn't even mention the breach. [0] https://docs.gravityforms.com/gravityforms-change-log/ https://docs.gravityforms.com/gravityforms-change-log/
- giingyui 1y ago[dead]
- redrove 1y agoHonestly it still required a web search on my part to figure out it’s a WordPress plugin. That should be in the title.
- autoexec 1y agoAny time I read the words vulnerable and plugin I just assume WordPress is involved somehow. I'm convinced that the internet would be instantly more secure if the entire platform died off.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoIt would. It also would be a lot less useful. A lot of content is published through WordPress. I suspect an effective approach would be encouraging ways to make WP more secure, or publish a secure platform that can easily be transitioned from WP.
- d0mine 1y agoWordpress dominates internet outside megacorps. There are a lot of security issues but there is a lot of utility too.
- 1y ago
- neomantra 1y agoI really appreciate that this supply breach was discovered by a diligent system operator (tracking a slow HTTP request). Similarly, the xz breach was uncovered by a diligent developer looking at quirky SSH login performance regressions.
- mlyle 1y agoMalware used to be pretty obvious for performance penalties. But we are getting so much faster, and networks are doing so much weird inscrutable stuff now that it’s a lot harder at baseline. And, of course, the baddies are getting sneakier, too, and we are building systems from more components from more diverse sources. I worry about the long term picture a lot; does all of infrastructure become a little untrustworthy at baseline?
- SV_BubbleTime 1y ago> I worry about the long term picture a lot; does all of infrastructure become a little untrustworthy at baseline? Isn’t that a scenario that is better? If you stop trusting potentially insecure systems you start developing hard and solid ones. I don’t worry about deepfakes or AI malware, I welcome it. It’s stupid that we have insecure systems like unencrypted emails, social security cards, unsigned documents, passwords in PIN codes alone, etc.
- mlyle 1y agoI think what I am describing is worse. I have a harder and harder time as software and the resultant supply chain surface grows. And my chance to filter, monitor, validate, and audit software gets correspondingly worse as systems do more and more. More components; recursive dependencies; more remote infrastructure; these are the directions the world is going, and the stuff we need to manage this complexity is not keeping up.
- marcosdumay 1y agoHum... If you try to fight the stuff on your first paragraph with more of anything, you'll lose every single time. You can only fight it with fewer components, fewer recursive dependencies, and less remote infrastructure.
- iambateman 1y agoHow is this even possible? Is the most likely explanation that a bad actor within GravityForms snuck something in? I didn’t see anything in the article but I may have missed it.
- Y-bar 1y agoCould have been a compromised CI pipeline like Jenkins or a developer machine with a malware infection.
- Hilift 1y agoDo you allow permissive outgoing Internet traffic from your servers? To domains recently created? This malware is for you.
- hammyhavoc 1y agoTen bucks says it's prompt hijacking an LLM being used to code and reference docs.
- doodlebugging 1y agoNice work to identify this malware and take action against it spreading. The article does have one small error though that made me do a double-take. The most recent update at the top of the page should probably be "Update 7-12-2025 06:00 UTC" instead of the current future date of 08-11-2025. I think the author incremented the wrong digit.
- blueflow 1y agoOf course the author got confused about which number means which. This is what you deserve when you use US dates but try to make them look like ISO by using dashes, but still fuck up the ordering and padding.
- mmsc 1y agoPopped by AB of Ac1dB1tch3z
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bhk 1y agoWhat does this impact? 90% of sites on the internet? Just a couple of low-traffic sites?
- rectang 1y agoSomewhere in between. Gravity Forms is a very popular premium WordPress plugin. I maintain a handful of WordPress sites (wouldn't have been my choice of platform but whatever) and the design and functionality of Gravity Forms is better than most (aside from it being CPU-hungry). It doesn't generally give me trouble and as a developer I've been happy with how Rocket Genius have interacted with me when I've filed trouble tickets. A pretty substantial number of small and mid-tier orgs have Gravity Forms installed. I don't know the numbers — the wordpress.org popularity stats mainly reflect installation of free plugins not premium — but there should be a lot of sites handling a lot of traffic. EDIT: That's the number of sites which could have been affected. Fortunately only a small number of sites actually got the compromised package because it didn't enter the main automatic distribution chain.
- dotancohen 1y agoI haven't done Wordpress since before 5.0 (Gutenberg), but even then (2017) Gravity Forms was used on almost every site.
- chuckreynolds 1y agoseemingly small amount of sites that manually downloaded that version from the site as opposed to 'most' that get premium(paid) update files through their API gateway (that I think calls file from AWS). > The Gravity API service that handles licensing, automatic updates, and the installation of add-ons initiated from within the Gravity Forms plugin was never compromised. All package updates managed through that service are unaffected.
- Dazzler5648 1y ago"The infection does not seem to be widespread, which could mean that the backdoored plugin was only available for a very short period of time and only delivered to a small number of users."
- rectang 1y ago> We also received a confirmation from one of the staff of RocketGenius that the malware only affects manual downloads and composer installation of the plugin. Phew.
- anthonyeden 1y agoThe official Gravity Forms post [0] indicates you were only compromised if you installed Gravity Forms via direct website download or Composer install. From what I can see, Composer install methods use the same Gravity Forms API to fetch the install package as the auto-update feature within the plugin. Their WP-CLI plugin uses the same mechanism too. It will be interesting to see if the Gravity Forms developers engage a third party security firm to investigate this incident. So far they have not mentioned it. [0] https://www.gravityforms.com/blog/security-incident-notice/ https://www.gravityforms.com/blog/security-incident-notice/
- kristianc 1y agoAm I alone in thinking it's kind of nuts that there's a $259 extension for Web Forms in the first place. Is this WordPress being horribly broken, the WordPress ecosystem being a playground for grifters, naive non-technical WordPress users or all three?
- sen 1y agoDefinitely all 3.
- kmeisthax 1y ago[dead]
- pacifika 1y agoWordPress usecases are wider than most people expect.
- stebian_dable 1y agoIt’s GPLv2+ so you can grab a copy from a friend legally for free and vibe code around the possible copy protections.
- Y-bar 1y agoWhy do you think so? $259 is less than a day’s worth of freelance invoice by the hour. Web forms and especially the business logic powering them in the backend can quickly become very complex. Just check out some templates you get out of the box https://www.gravityforms.com/form-templates/ https://www.gravityforms.com/form-templates/ I don’t use Wordpress, but this seems like an actively developed, supported, quality plug-in. This entitled assumption that nothing should cost money up front is hurting everyone in they long run because it drives developers into monetising using ads and invasive tracking.
- hammyhavoc 1y agoSo quality and actively developed that it suffered a pretty embarrassing supply chain attack? Yeah, that isn't good.
- hammyhavoc 1y agoHow long did this go unnoticed for?