Closures of Very Popular WordPress Plugins, Week of June 7
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 it has been reopened.
VK All in One Expansion Unit
The plugin VK All in One Expansion Unit, which has 50,000+ installs, was closed on Saturday. The plugin was reopened on Sunday after changes were made that were described as “[ Delete function ] test version update checker.” It looks like that involved non-default code that would check for updates for the plugin on the developer’s website. In a quick check we didn’t see any obvious security vulnerabilities.