Closures of Very Popular WordPress Plugins, Week of March 29
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 three of those plugins were closed and two of them have been reopened.
Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons (Social Media and Share Icons (Ultimate Social Media))
Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons (Social Media and Share Icons (Ultimate Social Media)), which has 200,000+ installs, was closed on Wednesday. That was closed due to a vulnerability we noticed while doing some quick checking of insecure usage of the extract() function in WordPress plugins. It was reopened today.
Social Share Icons & Social Share Buttons (Ultimate Social Media PLUS)
Social Share Icons & Social Share Buttons (Ultimate Social Media PLUS), which has 60,000+ installs, was closed on Wednesday. That was closed due to a vulnerability we noticed while doing some quick checking of insecure usage of the extract() function in WordPress plugins.
SMTP Mailer
SMTP Mailer, which has 40,000+ installs, was closed yesterday. No official reason has been given for the closure, but after it was closed a new version was submitted with the accurate changelog “SMTP Mailer no longer shows the saved password in the settings.” and then it was reopened. Consider that only those with the “manage_options” capability, which would normally only be Administrators, can access that page, we are not following why you would need to close the plugin over that. When we went to try to get a better understanding of that we found that there was a vulnerability that is currently in the plugin.