Over the coming months, this series will be presented through multiple blog posts, each delving into the fundamentals of WordPress's architecture and security mechanisms while featuring real-world examples of vulnerabilities and their exploitation.
Our goal for this series is to lay a foundation for your research endeavors and to inspire you to apply your newfound knowledge in discovering and responsibly disclosing vulnerabilities through the Wordfence Bug Bounty Program, which not only allows you to earn rewards up to $10,400 for your work, but also allows you to contribute to our collective mission to Secure the Web.
As a reminder, every vulnerability reported through our Bug Bounty Program is validated and responsibly disclosed by our team of professionals, which means the more vulnerabilities reported to us, the more secure the WordPress ecosystem becomes.
We then republish these vulnerabilities for free and at no cost for use by vendors, researchers, and anyone else interested, to help secure the WordPress community.
It also includes free use of the data to mass scan WordPress servers for vulnerabilities via Wordfence CLI, which includes completely free vulnerability scanning with no limitations.
We've designed this series to guide you through the WordPress security landscape by building your knowledge from the ground up.
We'll start with the fundamental principles of how WordPress operates, progressively layering on complexity as we move towards practical vulnerability research.
WordPress Request Architecture and Hooks: At the heart of WordPress is its ability to process and respond to web requests.
WordPress Security Architecture: Building on our understanding of request handling, we'll examine the Security API. This section will unpack the security features provided by WordPress and how they can be leveraged by plugin and theme developers to fortify their code.
Setting Up Your Research Lab: We'll walk you through establishing a WordPress security research lab environment, equipped with the necessary tools for effective debugging and analysis.
Identifying Vulnerable Functions: We'll walk through WordPress plugin and theme code and uncover functions that may harbor vulnerabilities, employing both dynamic and static analysis techniques.
Real-World Vulnerabilities: We'll delve into a wide range of vulnerability types, from Missing Authorization and Cross-Site Scripting, to Privilege Escalations and Remote Code Executions.
Through these examples, you'll see how even well-intentioned developers can make mistakes and create vulnerabilities-either by neglecting built-in security features or by implementing them incorrectly.
We'll also provide tips and guidance on how to avoid, or patch, these vulnerabilities so developers can avoid introducing them in the first place.
WordPress has been around for 20 years and has a very strong user base - powering 43% of all websites on the web.
WordPress provides excellent developer documentation via their codex site at https://codex.
With the Wordfence Intelligence Bug Bounty Program, you can now earn rewards for your work in the WordPress space while we feed your work back into the ecosystem for free through our API, webhooks, and Wordfence CLI, making it an ideal ecosystem to get started in.
WordPress supports a number of HTTP server and database management software.
If you're interested in secure code review and itching to discover your first vulnerability, WordPress is the perfect place to get started.
You can start by reading the first chapter of the series, WordPress Request Architecture and Hooks, which has been released alongside this introductory blog post.
This Cyber News was published on www.wordfence.com. Publication date: Mon, 01 Jul 2024 16:43:06 +0000