Malware found in official gravityforms plugin indicating supply chain breach

https://patchstack.com/articles/critical-malware-found-in-gravityforms-official-plugin-site/

by taubek • 1 year ago

235 56 1 year ago

mpol• 1 year ago

Using 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• 1 year ago

I’m from a technical background and so I understand this but being a Brit sentences like this are always funny to me

theglenn88_• 1 year ago

Not On Normal Courtyard Exercise

astura• 1 year ago

For those who didn't understand this comment (like me)

Nonce is also British slang for alleged or convicted sex offenders, especially ones involving children.

giingyui• 1 year ago

Should say what plugin it is.

Etheryte• 1 year ago

It'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/

redrove• 1 year ago

Honestly it still required a web search on my part to figure out it’s a WordPress plugin. That should be in the title.

rectang3• 1 year ago

There's a blog post about the incident:

https://www.gravityforms.com/blog/security-incident-notice/

neomantra• 1 year ago

I 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.

mlyle5• 1 year ago

Malware 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_BubbleTime2• 1 year 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.

bee_rider• 1 year ago

Wasn’t that supposed to be the default assumption? The bad guys start just after your network interface.

This was the argument against WiFi encryption in the old days (who cares about WiFi encryption, the network is assumed evil, so your messages should be encrypted rendering WiFi security moot). Which actually seemed pretty compelling to me. Nowadays, of course, someone will hop on your WiFi and download a bunch of movies without authorization, giving you copyright headaches. But that’s authentication…

iambateman• 1 year ago

How 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-bar4• 1 year ago

Could have been a compromised CI pipeline like Jenkins or a developer machine with a malware infection.

Hilift• 1 year ago

Do you allow permissive outgoing Internet traffic from your servers? To domains recently created? This malware is for you.

hammyhavoc4• 1 year ago

Ten bucks says it's prompt hijacking an LLM being used to code and reference docs.

doodlebugging• 1 year ago

Nice 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• 1 year ago

Of 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• 1 year ago

Popped by AB of Ac1dB1tch3z

bhk• 1 year ago

What does this impact? 90% of sites on the internet? Just a couple of low-traffic sites?

rectang3• 1 year ago

Somewhere 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• 1 year ago

I haven't done Wordpress since before 5.0 (Gutenberg), but even then (2017) Gravity Forms was used on almost every site.

chuckreynolds• 1 year ago

seemingly 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• 1 year 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."

rectang3• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

The 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/

kristianc• 1 year ago

Am 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• 1 year ago

Definitely all 3.

pacifika• 1 year ago

WordPress usecases are wider than most people expect.

stebian_dable• 1 year ago

It’s GPLv2+ so you can grab a copy from a friend legally for free and vibe code around the possible copy protections.

Y-bar4• 1 year ago

Why 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/

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.

hammyhavoc4• 1 year ago

So quality and actively developed that it suffered a pretty embarrassing supply chain attack? Yeah, that isn't good.

bombcar• 1 year ago

$259 is dirt cheap for a tool that does what you want:need.

For many people with Wordpress sites they’re going to spend way more than that having someone setup the forms for them.

hammyhavoc4• 1 year ago

How long did this go unnoticed for?

Malware found in official gravityforms plugin indicating supply chain breach

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