Thousands of Magento Sites Hit in Ongoing Defacement Campaign

Over 7,500 Magento sites have been hit in a mass defacement campaign that started three weeks ago, digital risk protection platform Netcraft reports. As part of the attacks, threat actors deployed defacement files directly on the affected infrastructure, in the form of plaintext files, across more than 15,000 hostnames. Most of the observed text files contain the attacker handles, but a fraction of them involve political messages referencing recent geopolitical conflicts. “At the time of publication, these messages appeared for only a single day, 7 March 2026. They were not present in earlier or later defacements, suggesting that this was not the primary motivation of the campaign,” Netcraft says. The security firm notes that most of the incidents were reported to the defacement archive Zone-H using the account ‘Typical Idiot Security’, which is also the handle present in the defacement messages, suggesting that the threat actor is trying to build a reputation. According to Netcraft, the attacker is likely exploiting an unauthenticated file upload vulnerability impacting Magento Open Source (Community Edition), Magento Enterprise / Adobe Commerce, and Adobe Commerce deployments with Magento B2B. Netcraft identified similarities with the October 2025 attacks exploiting the SessionReaper flaw and was able to exploit the latest Magento Community version to upload a text file to a test instance. The campaign affected global brands such as Asus, BenQ, Citroën, Diesel, FedEx, Fiat, FilaBandai, Lindt, Toyota, and Yamaha, mainly hitting subdomains, regional storefronts, and staging environments, though some production-facing sites were also briefly defaced. Several regional government services, university domains in Latin America and Qatar, and international non-profit organizations were also affected. Several domains associated with the Trump Organization were also defaced. PolyShell vulnerability  News of the defacement campaign came while Sansec reported a new flaw in the REST API of Magento and Adobe Commerce that could be exploited to upload executables to any store, without authentication. The bug, it says, impacts all Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce versions up to 2.4.9-alpha2, and could be exploited for XSS in all iterations before version 2.3.5. “The vulnerable code has existed since the very first Magento 2 release. Adobe fixed it in the 2.4.9 pre-release branch as part of APSB25-94, but no isolated patch exists for current production versions,” Sansec says. According to the security company, which named the vulnerability PolyShell, many sites expose files in the upload directory, but the flaw does not appear to have been exploited in the wild. “Sansec has not observed active exploitation so far. However, the exploit method is circulating already, and Sansec expects automated attacks to appear soon,” the cybersecurity firm says. Related: Threat Actor Targeting VPN Users in New Credential Theft Campaign Related: Hundreds of Salesforce Customers Allegedly Targeted in New Data Theft Campaign Related: Cloned AI Tool Sites Distribute Malware in ‘InstallFix’ Campaign Related: LastPass Warns of New Phishing Campaign WRITTEN BY Ionut Arghire Ionut Arghire is an international correspondent for SecurityWeek. 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