Earlier this week we discussed an incorrect belief that WordPress plugins that are monetized will have any discovered security issues quickly fixed, which led to the suggestion that you should only use monetized plugins. That is far from the only time we have seen advice on choosing plugins to use with an emphasis on security that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Another one out there is that popular plugins are somehow more secure. The reality is that we haven’t seen any evidence presented that would back up there is a correlation between popularity and security. About the closest we can think of is that it does appear that people looking for vulnerabilities for non-malicious purposes (whether they be security researchers or security companies interested in publicity) are more likely to look at more popular plugins. That seems to be at least partly due to the fact that security journalist are more likely to cover very minor vulnerabilities that have been fixed in popular plugins than unfixed vulnerabilities that are being exploited in less popular plugins, despite the latter being much more important to cover.

That brings us to a very popular plugin we recently took a look into after a vulnerability was vaguely disclosed in it. The plugin Duplicate Page has 300,000+ active installations according to wordpress.org. That plugin allows duplicating pages and posts. Recently the security scanner service Detectify disclosed that the plugin has or had contained an “Authenticated XSS” vulnerability. As we have done with other vulnerabilities they have been vaguely disclosing, but usually not bothering to notify the developer of, we went to try to determine what the issue was and then notify the developer. Once we started looking into this we found five vulnerabilities in the plugin due to multiple security failures, most of which involve failing to do security basics. [Read more]