Closures of Very Popular WordPress Plugins, Week of September 27
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.
PixelYourSite
The plugin PixelYourSite, which has 100,000+ installs, was closed on Wednesday. It appears that it was closed due to its previous display name on the PixelYourSite – Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics, Head & Footer (WooCommerce, EDD, Events).
Would you consider looking at WP Lister Lite for eBay and WP Lister Lite for Amazon? They’ve just been temporarily removed with no explanation. Thanks, Jason
Neither of those are among the 1,000 most popular plugins, so they wouldn’t be checked as part of that. If you want to know if those plugins are secure or not then the best thing to do is to get a security review of them done. If you are a paying customer of our service you can suggest/vote for them to receive a security review from us as part of the service or you can order a separate review from us.
Thanks. Their removal from the plugin directory is a bit of a story as even the author is not clear why they got taken down. They believe it may be an automated scan that triggered a false positive.
The author should know why it has been removed, so they shouldn’t be guessing why it was removed. That belief would be out of line with what we have seen in the past, so it seems unlikely to be the case, unless something has recently changed.
Take a look at their public response – https://wordpress.org/support/topic/reason-for-closing/#post-12053730
That indicates that the plugin was closed due trademark usage, which has been a common cause of closures. Once plugins are closed they do often require security related changes are made, some that don’t really make sense, but that wouldn’t have led to the closure.