Closures of Very Popular WordPress Plugins, Week of March 8
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 those plugins was closed and has not been reopened.
WooCommerce Variation Swatches
WooCommerce Variation Swatches, which has 40,000+ installs, was closed on Tuesday. No reason has been given for the closure so far and no update to the plugin has been released so far. We didn’t see any obvious security issues in a quick check over the plugin.