Closures of Very Popular WordPress Plugins, Week of November 1
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.
During the week of November 1, four of those plugins were closed.
Count Per Day
The plugin Count Per Day, which has 100,000+ installs, was closed on Sunday of last week. If you were using our service you would have long ago been warned that the current version of the plugin is insecure (that it remained in the Plugin Directory for over two years after that is a reminder of WordPress’s unfortunate lack of concern with the continued lack of proper oversight of the team running the Plugin Directory).
Easy Columns
The plugin Easy Columns, which has 70,000+ installs, was closed last Sunday. If you were our customer and using this plugin you could have already been warned that it contains an authenticated persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability.
Remove Query Strings From Static Resources
The plugin Remove Query Strings From Static Resources, which has 100,000+ installs, was closed last Monday.
Snazzy Maps
The plugin Snazzy Maps, which has 80,000+ installs, was closed last Wednesday. If you were our customer and using this plugin you could have already been warned that it contains a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability.