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 two of those plugins were closed and both of them have been reopened.

If you were a customer of our service you would have already been warned if you were using one of the plugins we found to contain security vulnerabilities due to this monitoring.

Post SMTP

The plugin Instagram Post SMTP, which has 100,000+ installs, was closed on Monday. The plugin appears to have been closed due to the results of the security review of the plugin we did based on our customers voting for it to be reviewed. The plugin was reopened later on Monday without those security issues being resolved.

WP DSGVO Tools (GDPR)

The plugin WP DSGVO Tools (GDPR), which has 40,000+ installs, was closed on Thursday. The plugin apparently was closed due a guideline violation.  We found that it contains a security vulnerability and looks to contain additional security issues. The plugin was reopened today without the security vulnerability being resolved

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