Before we start using a new WordPress plugin on our website, we do a security review of it, which led to us doing one for Category Posts Widget.

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The review was done on version 4.9.11 of Category Posts Widget. We checked for the following issues during this review:

• Insecure file upload handling (this is the cause of the most exploited type of vulnerability, arbitrary file upload)
• Deserialization of untrusted data
• Security issues with functions accessible through WordPress’ AJAX functionality (those have and continue to be a common source of disclosed vulnerabilities)
• Security issues with functions accessible through WordPress’ REST API (those have started to be a source of disclosed vulnerabilities)
• Persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in the frontend portions of the plugin and in the admin portions accessible to users with the Author role or below
• Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities in the admin portion of the plugin
• SQL injection vulnerabilities (the code that handles requests to the database)
• Reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities
• Security issues with functions accessible through any of the plugin’s shortcodes
• Security issues with functions accessible through the admin_action action
• Security issues with functions accessible through the admin_init action
• Security issues with functions accessible through the admin_post action
• Security issues with import/export functionality
• Security issues with usage of the is_admin() function
• Security issues with usage of the add_option(), delete_option(), and update_option() functions
• Security issues with usage of the update_user_meta() function
• Security issues with usage of the extract() function
• Lack of IP address validation
• CSV injection
• Host header injection vulnerabilities
• Lack of protection against unintended direct access of PHP files
• Insecure and unwarranted requests to third-party websites
• Any additional possible issues identified by our Plugin Security Checker

Three of those items are brand new additions to our reviews, which we have introduced to provide more complete reviews and improve our ability to catch vulnerabilities that would be likely to be exploited by hackers (even if they are rather obscure issues):

• Security issues with usage of the update_user_meta() function
• Lack of IP address validation
• CSV injection

Results

We found no issues with any of the checked items in version 4.9.11 of Category Posts Widget.