Alert: WordPress Security Team Impersonation Scams

The WordPress Security Team is aware of multiple ongoing phishing scams impersonating both the “WordPress team” and the “WordPress Security Team“ in an attempt to convince administrators to install a plugin on their website which contains malware.

The WordPress Security Team will never email you requesting that you install a plugin or theme on your site, and will never ask for an administrator username and password.

If you receive an unsolicited email claiming to be from WordPress with instructions similar to those described above, please disregard the emails and indicate that the email is a scam to your email provider.

These emails link to a phishing site that appears to be the WordPress plugin repository on a domain that is not owned by WordPress or an associated entity. Both Patchstack and Wordfence have written articles that go in to further detail.

Official emails from the WordPress project will always:

• Come from a @wordpress.org or @wordpress.net domain.
• Should also say “Signed by: wordpress.org” in the email details section.

The WordPress Security Team will only communicate with WordPress users in the following locations:

• the Making WordPress Secure blog at make.wordpress.org/security
• the main WordPress News site at wordpress.org/news

The WordPress Plugin team will never communicate directly with a plugin’s users but may email plugin support staff, owners and contributors. These emails will be sent from [email protected] and be signed as indicated above.

The official WordPress plugin repository is located at wordpress.org/plugins with internationalized versions on subdomains, such as fr.wordpress.org/plugins, en-au.wordpress.org/plugins, etc. A subdomain may contain a hyphen, however a dot will always appear before wordpress.org.

A WordPress site’s administrators can also access the plugin repository via the plugins menu in the WordPress dashboard.

As WordPress is the most used CMS, these types of phishing scams will happen occasionally. Please be vigilant for unexpected emails asking you to install a theme, plugin or linking to a login form.

The Scamwatch website has some tips for identifying emails and text messages that are likely to be scams.

As always, if you believe that you have discovered a security vulnerability in WordPress, please follow the project’s Security policies by privately and responsibly disclosing the issue directly to the WordPress Security team through the project’s official HackerOne page.

Thank you Aaron Jorbin, Otto, Dion Hulse, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and Jonathan Desrosiers for their collaboration on and review of this post.

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