In the past couple of days there have been scary sounding claims from journalists related to a recently fixed reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the WordPress plugin Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), which we had detailed on May 4 after a machine learning (AI) based system we have flagged the fix being made. The journalists claimed that an attacker was trying to exploit this. With headline claims including, “Hackers target WordPress plugin flaw after PoC exploit released” from the Bleeping Computer, as well as “Hackers exploit WordPress vulnerability within hours of PoC exploit release” from CSO Online, and “ACF Plugin’s Reflected XSS Vulnerability Attracts Exploit Attempts Within 24 Hours of Public Announcement” from the WP Tavern.

Those stories are somewhat inaccurate, as they are citing another company’s disclosure a day after us as being when the vulnerability was disclosed. But the far larger issue is that it seemed highly unlikely that an attacker was really trying to exploit this. If this was true, it would be rather news worthy since we have seen no evidence of any wide scale exploitation of reflected XSS vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins. It turns out the source for those stories, Akamai Security Intelligence Group (SIG) confused a script kiddie with an attacker, leading to those misleading stories. [Read more]