The marketing of security products and services often consists of misleading or outright false claims, which isn’t all that surprising considering how awful the security industry is.  One thing we have seen being misleadingly used fairly often is the phrase real-time, which often is used in way that make it sounds like a much higher level of service is being provided.

As example of that involving our area of focus, we recently ran across MainWP, a service for managing multiple WordPress websites, promoting an extension for their service that accesses data from the WPScan Vulnerability Database with this claim:

• The Vulnerability database updates itself real-time so you don’t miss out on any vulnerabilities.

While it is true that data source updates in real-time that doesn’t mean that you won’t miss out vulnerabilities, because the real-time part is that you can access data on vulnerabilities in real-time after they are added to that data source. They first have to be added though, so what would matter is how long it takes for them to be added or if they are added at all. That is something MainWP doesn’t address there and we would guess they probably didn’t bother to look into it (it wouldn’t be the first someone made an inflated claim about the WPScan Vulnerability Database without knowing what they are talking about).

The reality is that in some cases a non real-time updated data source for plugin vulnerability data provides data that is missing entirely from the WPScan Vulnerability Database. That being the companion plugin for our service, for which we include data on vulnerabilities that appear to be being exploited, so that even those not using our service yet can be warned about them.

Two recent vulnerabilities missing from their data, but in our plugin, are good examples of how WPScan’s data is less than ideal and really should be paired with our plugin (or even better, just use our service).

On January 4 NinTechNet disclosed that they had seen an arbitrary file upload vulnerability in the plugin LearnDash LMS being exploited and that it had been fixed after they notified the developer. That didn’t seem to be an isolated situation as we were in contact with someone shortly after that whose website was likely had exploited through that vulnerability well.

That would seem to be an important vulnerability to warn about, but more than a month later it still hasn’t been added to the WPScan Vulnerability Database. By comparison our plugin has been warning about it since January 9 (and our service before that). Because that data comes with the plugin, our plugin would need to be updated to be warn about that, but if you are not keeping plugins up to date, you are going to have larger security issues.

On November 27 we disclosed an arbitrary file upload vulnerability in the plugin PHP Event Calendar.  We had noticed that after seeing someone probing for usage of the file the vulnerability existed in, on our website the day before, so it is likely that vulnerability is being exploited as well.

Two and half months later, during which we have seen additional probing for the plugin in third-party data we monitor, the vulnerability still hasn’t been added to the WPScan Vulnerability Database. It was added to our plugin’s data the same day we disclosed it (and added to our services data then as well). That vulnerability hasn’t been fixed, so simply keeping plugins up to date would not protect you from it.

Those examples stick out, not just because the vulnerabilities were being exploited, but because it would be so easy for the people behind the WPScan Vulnerability Database to make sure to include those, since all they would have to do is monitor changes being made to our plugin. It therefore probably isn’t all that surprising to hear that their database is also missing a lot of other vulnerabilities as well. For example, when we did a comparison of  new vulnerabilities added to the data set for our service versus WPScan’s during the month of June last year, we found that we had added three times as many vulnerabilities. There are other serious issues with their data, which we have discussed in the past.

Another thing to keep in mind, when it comes to real-time claims, is that they also depend on how often the source is being checked. MainWP doesn’t provide any information on how often their extension checks things, but with our service you can check as often as hourly to see if there are any vulnerabilities in the versions of plugins you are using.

This isn’t the only incident where something marketed as real-time has left a lot to be desired when it comes to plugin vulnerabilities, as back in June of 2016 we discussed Wordfence’s apparent lack of knowledge of numerous probable zero-day vulnerabilities despite the claims they make about their Real-Time Threat Defense Feed.