Hacked by Chinafans
Table of Contents
What Happened
On 2026/08/10 at 2:11 am Australian eastern standard time (2026/08/09 16:11 UTC) someone created a post titled “Hacked by Chinafans” on my documents blog [1]. The person in question created an account named “67965e42a3c3” on that site with the email address 67965e42a3c3@google.com associated with it (I tried emailing that address and it bounced).
At 04:28:41am Australian eastern standard time (18:28 UTC) I was sent an email titled “Have you been hacked” by a reader of my blogs who subscribed to the RSS feed of my documents blog (a blog that I never expected anyone to read by RSS). Along the lines of “the wisdom of crowds” should we have “the unexpected observation and problem reporting of crowds”? I appreciate the notification, I might not have noticed until the next time I watched an unusually good movie otherwise.
The account in question was apparently created on 2026-07-21 at 16:43:47 (presumably UTC) even though at the time I believe creating accounts was not permitted. As an aside the timestamp of account creation is stored in the user_registered column of the wp_users table in the database, there doesn’t appear to be a way to access this in a standard WordPress installation other than doing a SQL query.
2026-07-24 15:43:17 status triggers-pending wordpress:all 7.0+dfsg1-1 2026-07-24 15:43:19 upgrade wordpress:all 7.0+dfsg1-1 7.0.2+dfsg1-1
Above are the relevant sections of my dpkg log showing the WordPress versions in use. I was running version 7.0+dfsg1-1 at the time the account was apparently created. I am confident in the accuracy of the dpkg logs and believe that they did not compromise the OS, I am not sure whether they ran hostile SQL code to change fields in the MySQL database so had to consider the possibility that the account creation time could have been set to a deliberately misleading value. I checked backups of the MySQL database stored off-site and found that the account in question was not in the 2026-07-21 backup (which was done before 16:43) but in the 2026-07-22 backup.
The WordPress release history [2] has version 7.0.1 released on 2026-07-09 and version 7.0.2 released on 2026-07-17. So presumably the attacker diffed the code on those releases, found an exploitable bug, and used it to create an account on my blog with admin privs. Then they waited a few weeks to see if I would notice and published a blog post when I didn’t notice.
WordPress Deficiencies
- WordPress doesn’t seem to store the version it’s running at the time of operations. So anyone who doesn’t have a suitable external log of versions deployed (such as the dpkg.log file for a Debian managed installation) won’t know for sure which version was running. It supports automatic updates but you can’t be sure that they happened soon after the release.
- There is no log of IP addresses used for operations. There are apparently some 3rd party modules to log such things and web pages documenting how to modify the PHP to add it but nothing in the standard distribution.
- Software should have a standard distribution with some support for logging of security relevant data. The typical situation is that people don’t plan for logging such things until after they have been attacked so the data should be recorded without users going out of their way to log it.
- A log of security relevant data should be stored in a database table with only insert access (no update, delete, or drop).
- Ideally a CMS would support different database accounts for different purposes. Someone from an internal network or VPN could talk to an instance of the web server which has a database username and password giving full access. Everyone from outside the trusted range gets an instance of the web server with database access only allowing to read the posts and appearance configuration and to enter comments. If the database didn’t allow the account used for public access to create new admin users or create posts then it would be a lot harder for attackers.
- Ideally for everything that stores user account data there would be an easy way of getting a list of users in a plain text format to allow running diff. The design of WordPress has two tables, one for users and one for encoded metadata about users of which one will be the access level. The following SQL command will give a list of all users that aren’t subscribers (everyone above the minimum level of access which is typical for new users) along with their encoded password and access level. This could be used in a monitoring system to alert about new privileged users. The TABLE_PREFIX variable is for the prefix for WordPress tables, which is “wp_” by default but can be any legal value.
select $TABLE_PREFIXusers.user_login, $TABLE_PREFIXusers.user_pass, $TABLE_PREFIXusermeta.meta_value from $TABLE_PREFIXusers join $TABLE_PREFIXusermeta on $TABLE_PREFIXusers.id = $TABLE_PREFIXusermeta.user_id and meta_key='$TABLE_PREFIXcapabilities' and meta_value != 'a:1:{s:10:"subscriber";b:1;}';
What Next?
The blog post they created had a couple of links to Telegram which could presumably be used to contact them. If anyone involved in computer security wants a copy of the original post to do so then they can contact me by any of the usual methods.
I am interested in communication with the attacker if they wish, Telegram is not a service I use but I presume that anyone capable of doing this sort of attack is also capable of finding other ways of contacting me.
I have idly considered changing to a static site generator, here is a good list of static site generators [3].
I have also idly considered other platforms for blogging such as Lemmy. I don’t know if Lemmy is better than WordPress for security and updates, but there are plenty of free instances running where it wouldn’t be an issue I have to work on.
15 Years
It’s been 15 years since my blog server was cracked by a trojaned ssh client [4]. At least this time it was only one service that was compromised.