Closures of Very Popular WordPress Plugins, Week of July 5
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 been reopened.
Posts in Page
The plugin Posts in Page, which has 40,000+ installs, was closed today. According to the developer in a Support Forum topic, this was due to “a notification email address for [them] at wordpress.org bouncing.”. That seems like something that the WordPress team could be upfront about, but for whatever reason they think keeping people in the dark is somehow helpful, despite the developer not having an issue with telling people that. The plugin has now been reopened.
In our brief check over the plugin we didn’t see any obvious security issues in it.