One of the ways we help to improve the security of WordPress plugins, not just for the customers of our service, but for everyone using them, is our proactive monitoring of changes made to plugins in the Plugin Directory to try to catch serious vulnerabilities. Through that we caught a cross-site request forgery (CSRF)/arbitrary file deletion vulnerability in the plugin Backup Guard, which has 70,000+ installs. Despite being that popular, it doesn’t look like the security of the code has been well reviewed as the code that causes that lacks two basic security components. There are look to be additional security issues related to that insecurity, so we wouldn’t recommend using the plugin unless a thorough security review (like we do as part of our service and as a separate service) is done.

The possibility of this vulnerability is also flagged by our Plugin Security Checker, so you can check plugins you use to see if they might have similar issues with that tool. That tool flags the possibility of other issues in this plugin as well. [Read more]