One of the reasons why security is in such bad shape despite the enormous amount of money spent on it is that there is a failed market when it comes to security products and services. In simple terms it isn’t currently possible for consumers to make well informed decisions between different products and services due to rampant falsehoods and outright lies about them as well as a lack of watchdogs to limit those or independent entities that provides accurate information needed to be able to make informed decisions. What sticks out to us is how widespread these falsehoods and outright lies are. We often see them in just the somewhat obscure area we deal in, data on vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins.

Just last week we discussed how the makers of the very popular WordPress security plugin, Wordfence Security, were lying by claiming that the data source they use is “official” and only contains “confirmed/validated” vulnerabilities. In reality neither of those claims is true, there is no official source of WordPress plugin vulnerability data and their data source doesn’t actually confirm or validate vulnerabilities before including them. What they didn’t mention nor are we aware of them disclosing elsewhere is what the data source used is, which is the WPScan Vulnerability Database. They are hardly alone in using that source and they are certainly not alone in not being upfront about using that data source, which is its own problem because we have seen people believe that multiple organizations were confirming a vulnerability when all of them were simply repeating an unconfirmed claim from that data source. [Read more]