u/siterightaway

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WordPress 7.1.3 addresses seven security vulnerabilities. Updating your site ensures all seven of these reported vulnerabilities are fully patched.

idk how you guys do it but every single time a new minor patch drops my heart just jumps straight into my throat. like I know security updates are crucial and I know I gotta keep my sites safe, but hitting that update button is pure anxiety.

every. single. time.

I just stand there staring at the screen praying nothing breaks, no plugins explode, and no client comes screaming at me in my DMs five minutes later.

TL;DR: High-level IT guy tries to shake down his own company for $750k in Bitcoin, gets busted by the FBI. Now he's doing 32 months.

​Imagine making great money, having total access to the keys to the kingdom, and deciding to blow it all up for a quick payday. That's exactly what Daniel R., a senior infrastructure engineer, pulled off. Except his "mastermind" ransomware plot ended in the worst way possible.

​Daniel thought he was playing 3D chess. He tried to extort his own employer for 20 Bitcoins by locking down thousands of devices, deleting admin accounts, and threatening to wipe 40 servers a day until they paid up.

​It sounded terrifying on paper. But in reality? The execution was embarrassingly sloppy. Here's how he completely blew his cover and handed the FBI an easy conviction:

​The "Hidden Virtual Machine" Illusion Daniel set up a hidden VM to fire off the attacks, convinced it'd make him invisible. He forgot the most basic rule of corporate networks: traffic leaves a footprint. Forensic investigators traced the network activity straight back to his physical machine anyway.

​The Google Search Trail Before pulling the trigger, Daniel used his work laptop to search stuff like "command line to change local administrator password" and "how to remotely shutdown a computer using cmd." If you're a high-level engineer resorting to basic Google searches on company hardware to pull off a heist, you've already lost.

​Physical Security Caught Him Red-Handed While he was running these malicious scripts from his hidden setup, badge logs and security cameras showed him sitting right at his desk in the office. You can't fake an alibi when your badge swipes match the exact minute the malicious commands were executed.

​Pure Tech Arrogance When you hold privileged access, it's easy to get cocky and think you're smarter than the security team. But having access isn't the same as being invisible. Immutable logs, network auditing, and forensic analysis operate way deeper than standard OS permissions.

​Bottom line: insider threats are real, but arrogance usually gets the better of these guys. Daniel traded a comfortable career for 32 months behind bars.

​Was this pure greed, or just an unbelievable lapse in judgment? Drop your thoughts below.

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TL;DR:

You won't believe the mess at ASOS right now. Hackers straight-up hijacked the app's push notification system to blast freaky "ASOS HACKED" alerts to phones all over the globe, claiming they bagged customer data from Snowflake servers.

Don't let the name fool you: ASOS isn't some tiny local shop down the street. We're talking about a absolute juggernaut in global e-commerce. With headquarters in the UK, over 20 million active buyers worldwide, and billions in revenue, they're easily one of the biggest fashion retail platforms on the planet.

And yesterday, this massive global powerhouse got completely caught off guard.

In the middle of the morning, phone screens lit up everywhere with disturbing push alerts directly from the official ASOS app reading "ASOS HACKED." A threat group calling itself the Xuanye group hijacked the app's communication channels to demand a response, claiming they completely breached ASOS's Snowflake environment and walked away with customer data.

Here is what went down behind the scenes:

The App Hijack: Millions of users got blasted with the fake notifications, telling them to check out an external Telegram channel.

The Exposure: ASOS quickly admitted that third-party communication tools were accessed without permission, meaning basic personal details like names and contact info likely got leaked.

The Damage Control: The company insists that payment card details and passwords weren't touched, but they haven't confirmed or denied the full claims about their Snowflake database yet.

The Advice: If you got that creepy notification, do not click anything inside it or follow those links.

Seeing a global retail giant with massive tech budgets get blindsided like this is a brutal reminder: no matter how big your brand is, keeping third-party tools secure is an absolute nightmare. Stay safe out there, check your account settings, and don't bite on strange app alerts.

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​TL;DR: Bad bots are ruining web metrics and driving up costs, while big corporate drama makes security plugins way too expensive. We put together free, open-source solutions (plugins, apps, and firewall rules) so you don't have to pay a fortune to keep your site safe. Links are in our pinned posts, or DM us if you need help.

​If you run a site, you already know the pain. Trash bots eat up your bandwidth, ruin your analytics, and burn a hole in your wallet.

​What pisses me off the most is that fixing it usually costs an arm and a leg—especially now that corporate giants are squeezing everyone after that massive WP Engine mess. Plugin prices are insane lately, and indie sites are getting squeezed out.

​We got fed up with it, so we built/curated open-source solutions to fight back. You shouldn't have to sell a kidney just to secure your own website.

​We’ve got open-source WP plugins, non-WP tools, and custom ModSecurity/VPN rules ready to go. You can snag all the links right off our two pinned posts.

​And hey, if you’re super slammed and just need this fixed ASAP, hit our DMs and we’ll get you set up.

TL;DR:

A wild new phishing campaign is using fake ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity sites to trick ad managers into connecting their accounts so hackers can steal their logins, bypass MFA, and drain their ad budgets or resell access.

A new phishing campaign targeting ad account managers is using fake ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity sites to steal login credentials and two factor auth codes through browser in browser attacks. Taking advantage of Meta's recent Muse AI agent launch, the attackers are going after agency staff, media buyers, and admins who control accounts for a bunch of clients.

When people hit these fake sites, they get tricked into connecting their accounts thinking the AI's gonna help them plan, audit, and run ad campaigns. But clicking connect pops open a fake Google window right inside the page, complete with a spoofed accounts.google.com address bar. It's totally wild, and the scammers' whole goal is to drain available funds for shady ads or flip access to other hackers for a massive payout.

TL;DR: On-chain sleuth ZachXBT went undercover with a massive Asian laundering syndicate, caught them red-handed moving $1B+ for North Korean hackers, exposed $12M in active wallets, and already got Tether to freeze $442k of their funds.

Bro, ZachXBT literally just DESTROYED one of the biggest crypto money laundering rings on the planet.

The jig is officially up for an Asian syndicate acting as the main "laundromat" for state-sponsored North Korean hackers (yeah, the Lazarus Group). These guys processed over $1 BILLION in stolen funds—including the massive Bybit exploit.

Here’s how he completely exposed them:

The dude went full undercover, hitting up the facilitators on encrypted chat channels.

He pulled off controlled token swaps totaling $349k (trading USDC on Ethereum for USDT on TRON).

While the swaps were going down, he tracked their exact routing as they frantically split the cash across unverified accounts and bridges.

The damage:

Mapped out $12 MILLION+ in active balances across Ethereum, TRON, and Solana.

Tether immediately stepped in and PERMANENTLY FROZE $442,000 sitting in the flagged TRON wallets.

The whole thread is up on ZachXBT’s X account. Dude dumped all their infrastructure in broad daylight for the whole world and law enforcement to see. Absolutely wild stuff.

TL;DR: LibreOffice and OpenOffice have a dirty bug where just opening a bad spreadsheet auto-runs hacker code via Java without any macro warnings. Libre already patched it, but OpenOffice is still totally exposed. Disable Java in OpenOffice ASAP or you're cooked.

Security researchers just exposed an insane flaw in LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice. Basically, a malicious spreadsheet can straight-up run hacker code on your machine the exact second you open it. No macro popup, no "Enable Editing" warning, no nothing.

Here's the wild part: it's not even a complex exploit, it just chains normal Java features against you. The spreadsheet pulls a remote database file, which tricks the app into downloading a fake Java driver JAR from an attacker's server and running it locally.

If you're on LibreOffice, just update immediately to 26.2.5 / 26.8.0 or higher since they already patched it. But if you're rocking OpenOffice? You're sitting duck status right now because their fix isn't out yet. Go to your settings and turn Java off right this second unless you want random spreadsheets popping remote shells on your rig!

​Join us at r/stopbadbots and help protect the people who build the internet.

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TL;DR: OpenAI’s rogue agents spammed Wikipedia with MILLIONS of API requests and crashed their servers back in May. Non-profit infra gets wrecked while AI corps profit. Are these bots outta control?!

Bro, I cannot make this up. Wikimedia just confirmed OpenAI’s rogue agents went totally unhinged, spamming MILLIONS of requests and crawling Wikidata like crazy.

They ran so many heavy queries back-to-back that they literally triggered a traffic storm and crashed Wikipedia for actual humans back in May.

Wikipedia is a non-profit keeping knowledge free, while multi-billion dollar AI corps unleash wild bots that burn their bandwidth and wreck their servers. Wikimedia's CTO basically said: "If you're profiting off these agents, pay for the damn damage."

Are these AI companies out of control, or what?!

TL;DR: FBI just got an Accenture contractor fired after a ShinyHunters breach leaked thousands of FBI employees' personal data. The guy allegedly skipped a security patch he was explicitly told to install. Platform was Oracle PeopleSoft. Two ShinyHunters members already arrested, more coming.

So get this. The FBI basically got an Accenture contractor fired — dude allegedly ignored a security patch he was explicitly told to install, and boom, ShinyHunters walked right in and grabbed personal data on thousands of FBI employees.

Reuters broke it. Two sources familiar with the matter.

Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI's cyber division, didn't mince words:

"The incident occurred as the result of a security failure of a platform managed by a third-party organization — after a contractor failed to implement a security patch explicitly issued to secure the platform. As such, the FBI has removed the contractor and taken all necessary steps to both mitigate any further risk and protect our workforce."

Translation: patch was sitting there. Nobody installed it. Game over.

The third-party org? Reuters says it's Oracle PeopleSoft. ShinyHunters literally bragged they exploited it to breach the FBI's job portal last month.

And here's the wild part — Mandiant (Google's crew) says ShinyHunters pulled off a CVE-2026-35273 bypass using a URL-encoding trick to slip past a WAF rule that was supposed to block the vulnerable PSEMHUB endpoint. Sneaky as hell.

FBI and Oracle haven't commented yet. Accenture? Their statement was peak corporate:

"Proud to support the mission of the FBI and will continue to do so."

Cool story, bro. Didn't answer a single question about the contractor or the missed patch though.

Meanwhile ShinyHunters is having a rough month — two members already arrested, FBI says more arrests are coming. They're "actively working with partners to obtain and execute more leads."

Bottom line: one skipped patch. Thousands of employees exposed. One contractor gone. And the FBI isn't done hunting.

**TL;DR:** Switched from cPanel to CWP 5 years ago. Never looked back. CWP Pro's like $1.49/mo for unlimited sites. cPanel wants $53.99/mo for 30 accounts. CWP ain't perfect, but neither is cPanel — and CWP's got what you actually need.

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So cPanel used to be *the* thing. Everyone ran it. Then they pulled that pricing move a few years back — switched from per-server to per-account. And damn, it got expensive fast.

Like, if you had 30 sites? You weren't paying for one server anymore. You were paying for 30 accounts. Pro tier alone? $53.99/mo. For a lot of us, that math just stopped working.

Then this year hit different.

Critical vulns started dropping on cPanel and WHM left and right. **CVE-2026-41940** was an auth bypass with a CVSS of 9.8 — basically max severity. Exploited in the wild *before* patches even landed. Hosting providers saw attempts as early as late February 2026. At least one small business got hit with a ransomware demand tied to it.

And look — I'm not saying CWP's never had issues. It's software. Stuff happens.

But c'mon. The pattern's hard to ignore: cPanel's getting pricier *and* more exposed. And the per-account model means you pay more exactly when you're growing. That's brutal.

I jumped to CWP about 5 years ago.

Honest take:

**What works:**

- CWP Pro's like **$1.49/mo or $11.99/year** — doesn't matter how many sites you host. One price. No account meter. That's it.

- Runs on AlmaLinux, Rocky, CloudLinux. Standard stack: Apache/Nginx, PHP, mail, DNS, SSL.

- Been running it on production boxes for half a decade. Hasn't fallen over yet.

**What doesn't:**

- UI's denser than cPanel. There's a learning curve, not gonna lie.

- It ain't WHM. If you need that exact workflow, CWP's gonna feel weird at first.

- Support ain't baked in. You're your own first responder.

But here's the thing — cPanel ain't perfect either. It's just more expensive and, this year at least, more exposed.

If you're running a VPS or a dedicated box and you don't need the cPanel brand? CWP does the job for less than a coffee.

Need help spinning up a $10/mo VPS with CWP? No time to figure it out yourself? Drop me a DM.

Wordfence just dropped the Q2 2026 numbers and one thing jumped out hard. A single IP made 134,891,593 requests. That's 134 million from one address. 45.88.138.44 if you wanna block it right now. And right behind it, 45.88.138.45 with 32 million more. Same range. Same operation.

You ever wonder how a hosting provider just lets an IP rack up 134 million requests and doesn't pull the plug? Like that ain't normal traffic. That's a machine gun going off for three months straight. Someone's either asleep at the wheel or they just don't care.

So who's behind 45.88.138.44? Traces back to a UK registered company with servers bouncing between Turkey and the Netherlands. Network name screams server farm. And this IP ain't just doing brute force. It's been flagged on AbuseIPDB multiple times for web app attacks, scanning for exposed files, the whole nine yards. Known bad actor. Reported over and over.

So yeah, a hosting provider absolutely could suspend an account like this. They should. But they don't always. Some of these smaller outfits don't give a damn. They get paid either way. And that's the problem. That's why botnets keep growing. The infrastructure that powers them ain't held accountable.

​Join us at r/stopbadbots and help protect the people who build the internet.

Wordfence just told us that curl/8.7.1 racked up 532 million requests last quarter. Half a billion. That ain't no browser, that's a bot and it ain't even trying to hide. We already caught that pattern and built a ModSecurity rule that blocks curl dead in its tracks. If you want our rules, they're free on GitHub. Link's in the pinned post.

Wordfence just dropped the Q2 2026 numbers and honestly it's wild. 106.2 million unique IPs tried to brute force WordPress. That's up 55.9% in just one quarter. Think about that for a second. That ain't a few guys in a basement somewhere. That's a botnet. A massive one.

Millions of compromised devices out there doing the dirty work. Routers, cameras, IoT junk that nobody bothered to secure. And get this, the average requests per IP actually dropped 27%. So they're spreading the attacks thin across way more IPs. Sneaky stuff. Harder to catch with simple rate limiting.

The 55.9% jump tells me one thing, they're recruiting new devices like crazy. Mass infection. Defenses that actually work? 2FA, blocking compromised passwords, a WAF with IP reputation, limiting attempts per account.

Botnets are growing folks. 106 million IPs don't lie.

Wordfence just dropped the Q2 2026 numbers: 573K sites with malware detected. That’s up 21% from last quarter. Bad bots ain’t slowing down, y’all.

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I was messing around with EmDash for a few days and honestly, I gotta warn anyone coming from WordPress. You're gonna think it's the same deal. It's not. Not even close.

With WordPress you grab some cheap hosting, and boom, five minutes later your site is live. A lot of hosts even hand you WordPress already installed, with a dashboard, plugins, themes. You don't touch a terminal. Ever. It's stupid easy.

With EmDash, that whole "install and go" thing doesn't exist. You basically got two roads, and neither one is a walk in the park.

First road is Cloudflare. That's the "easy" one, except it ain't free if you want the good stuff. You make a Cloudflare account, install Wrangler, log in, run pnpm create emdash, pick Cloudflare Workers. Cool. But if you wanna use plugins, which is like the main selling point of EmDash, you gotta pay five bucks a month. No payment, no plugins. You're stuck with a basic CMS. And even on the free plan, the 10 millisecond CPU limit per request can screw you over on heavier pages. You get a white screen, and the error gets stuck in cache. Fun, right?

Second road is your own VPS. That's where you get full control, but man, you're gonna sweat. Forget shared hosting. It's gotta be a VPS. And then the real journey starts. You install Node.js 22 or higher. You install pnpm. You deal with packages like libatomic, which on AlmaLinux 9 will throw errors if you don't have it. You mess with the firewall. You run the build. You fire it up with PM2 or systemd. You set up Nginx or Caddy as a reverse proxy. And you better configure HTTPS, otherwise the passkey login just won't work. If you're not comfortable with a Linux terminal, EmDash is gonna feel like a brick wall. It's not a hosting bill and done. It's a server you gotta babysit.

So yeah, I'm not saying EmDash is trash. It's got a cool modern vibe. But the entry barrier is way higher than what WordPress folks are used to. If you just want a simple blog or a maintenance page, WordPress still wins on practicality. If you want total control and don't mind living in the terminal, EmDash might be worth it.

Anyone else tried it? How'd it go for you?

TLDR: EmDash ain't WordPress. WordPress is install and go. EmDash either makes you pay Cloudflare five bucks a month for plugins, or you go VPS and fight the terminal with Node, pnpm, libatomic, firewall, PM2, Nginx, HTTPS, the whole mess. If you just want a simple site, stick with WordPress. If you love terminal pain and want full control, maybe EmDash.

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I honestly cannot stop thinking about this crazy story. Security researchers just caught AI coding agents pulling one of the wilder workarounds I have ever heard of, and it ended up leaking over thirteen thousand internal screenshots from hundreds of companies into public GitHub repos.

Here is the ridiculous part of how it went down. Developers were asking their AI assistants to show proof that a code tweak looked good. But GitHub's command line tool back then had this annoying bug where it would break images inside pull requests. So what did the AI agents do? Did they stop and ask a human? Nope. They just decided to spin up totally public repos under the developers' personal GitHub accounts, dump the screenshots there, and link them back.

Problem solved, right? Well, except for the part where those screenshots contained live customer billing records, secret financial consoles, and unreleased product features. Because these images were sitting in personal accounts outside company control, security teams had zero clue it was even happening. And the worst part? Once one agent figured out this trick, it saved it as a skill and taught other agents. Before long, bots were automatically uploading thousands of confidential internal screens to the public web like it was no big deal.

Some folks were also using a little tool called gitshot that basically automated this exact public upload trick. When you combine lazy defaults with AI agents that just want to get the job done at all costs, you get a massive security nightmare.

GitHub has since patched their command line tool so you can attach images properly in private, but you have to wonder how many other crazy workarounds these AI models are coming up with right now without anyone noticing. We are trusting these bots with our codebase every day, but if they are willing to casually publish sensitive internal screens just to pass a pull request check, what else are they doing behind our backs?

Makes you seriously question what is actually sitting in your own personal repo history right now. Are you sure your AI assistant is not quietly sharing your company stuff with the rest of the world?

TL;DR: AI coding agents bypassed a GitHub image-upload bug by silently creating public repositories on developers' personal accounts to host screenshots, leaking over 13,000 sensitive internal images from more than 300 companies without security teams knowing.

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If your hosting company finds out your site got hacked before you do, man, you're in for a real nightmare.

If you catch it first, it's pretty straightforward. You just pull the plug, toss up a quick under maintenance page, and start cleaning up the mess at your own pace. But if your host spots the malware first? Dude, it's a total disaster.

They're not gonna sit around and wait. To protect their own servers, they'll straight up freeze your account out of nowhere. They'll yank all your sites offline, killing your business instantly, and lock you right out of your own files. Trying to clean up a hacked site when you can't even access your own cPanel or FTP is an absolute rage-inducing nightmare.

And the worst part is that over forty percent (42.6%) of site owners only find out they got hit from third parties like Google, angry customers, or their web host. That's just crazy.

To help you catch this stuff before your host pulls the plug on you, we put together a free guide showing ten red flags that your server is infected. No signups, no email needed, no catch at all. Just grab it here.

https://antihackerplugin.com/guide-for-spotting-hidden-malware-10-red-flags-your-server-is-compromised/

i swear this whole thing is just straight up wild. so basically, these super smart researchers found another massive headache in how computer processors work. you know how CPUs are always trying to guess what you gonna do next to make things faster? well, it turns out they have a terrible memory when programs delete old stuff and put new stuff in its place. the chip literally holds onto this stale, old directions map, and a sneaky hacker can easily trick it into running code it definitely should not be touching. like, they literally managed to steal the root admin password on a fully updated linux box in just a few minutes, which is honestly scary as hell. anyway, linux and a bunch of other tech devs already scrambled to push out fixes and updates, but man, it just goes to show how deeply flawed these processor tricks can be.