Protecting You Against Wordfence’s Bad Practices: XSS Vulnerability in All in One SEO Pack
Wordfence is putting WordPress website at risk by disclosing vulnerabilities in plugins with critical details needed to double check their work missing, in what appears to be an attempt to profit off of these vulnerabilities. We are releasing those details so that others can review the vulnerabilities to try to limit the damage Wordfence’s practice could cause.
The latest in our ongoing series of putting out the details of details of vulnerabilities discovered by Wordfence is good example of why what Wordfence is doing is hurting the security of WordPress plugins. In this case they saw a report of a persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the plugin All in One SEO Pack and discovered a similar vulnerability, which is something that often happens we security researchers see reports of vulnerabilities in plugins. The difference is that with that report, like other reports by responsible parties, it included the details of the vulnerabilities, so it was easy for Wordfence to see what the issue was in that case. By Wordfence excluding those details it makes it harder to do the same with vulnerabilities that they have discovered, but through our work on this we have already found two additional security vulnerabilities in the Yoast SEO plugin and one in the WP Fastest Cache plugin. [Read more]