Closures of Very Popular WordPress Plugins, Week of July 16
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 an instances where 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 because of a vulnerability.
During the week, one of those plugins was closed.
SendGrid
The plugin SendGrid, which has 100,000+ installs, was closed on Tuesday. No reason has been given for the closure, but the plugin’s description was updated four months ago with the following:
This plugin is no longer supported and will not work with the latest WordPress release. Feel free to fork the code from GitHub and revise the plugin to work for your needs. To learn more about Twilio SendGrid services visit SendGrid.com. https://github.com/sendgrid/wordpress/
In a quick check over the plugin, we didn’t see any obvious security vulnerabilities in it.