While we already are far ahead of other companies in keeping up with vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins (amazingly that isn’t an exaggeration), in looking in to how we could get even better we noticed that in a recent instance were a vulnerability was exploited in a plugin, we probably could have warned our customers about the vulnerability even sooner if we had looked at the plugin when it was first closed on the Plugin Directory instead of when the vulnerability was fixed (though as far as we are aware the exploitation started after we had warned our customers of the fix). So we are now monitoring to see if any of the 1,000 most popular plugins are closed on the Plugin Directory and then seeing if it looks like that was due to a vulnerability.

This week one of these plugins was closed and has been reopened.

WPFront User Role Editor

WPFront User Role Editor, which has 60,000+ installs, was closed on Sunday or Monday. No reason has been given for the closure. In looking over the changes made in the version released after it was closed it looks like a vulnerability outside of the scope of our service was fixed. The plugin was reopened on Monday.

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