What You Need to Know About the FancyBox for WordPress Vulnerability

FancyBox for WordPress is a plugin which provides stylized, Lightbox-like decoration for blog images. It’s a popular plugin with around half a million downloads, even though it hadn’t been updated in years. Posts emerged on the WordPress community support forum about malware injections and a vulnerability was discovered in the FancyBox plugin.

SiteLock scanners detected the malware — a Javascript payload with an iframe pointing to 203koko[dot]eu — before the vulnerability was known.

Here are three things to consider before moving forward with FancyBox:

Update FancyBox as soon as possible

The initial response to the FancyBox hack was to remove it immediately. Since the vulnerability released, the FancyBox developer released an update which corrects the issue and provides support for WordPress 4.1. If you’re uneasy about using FancyBox, Easy FancyBox is an actively developed alternative, though official Easy FancyBox support caps at WordPress 4.0.1.

Scan for Malware and use a WAF

One of the best ways to secure your website is to scan for malware and vulnerabilities on a daily basis and use a Web Application Firewall (WAF). The WAF will block potential threats from entering your website (e.g. DDoS attacks) while the daily scans will identify malware and vulnerabilities that have been placed on your site.

Update your WordPress plugins and themes

WordPress has done a wonderful job facilitating near-painless backups for its users. Once you get to the late 3.x releases, upgrades are essentially automatic. But what about plugins? More plugins, more problems, as the saying goes. Sometimes it’s not easy to wrangle the compatibility issues which come with the amazing and broad capabilities plugins add to a WordPress site.

Take it one plugin at a time. Research the plugin’s compatibility with the WordPress version you have, and then test it (with the previously mentioned backup at the ready).

SiteLock’s team of experts, expert services and products constantly monitor site files and traffic for malicious indicators. As with FancyBox, we’ll continue to find and mitigate malware even before before a vulnerability becomes known.

Contact SiteLock today to learn how website security software can help protect your website.