One of the issues we have run into with the web security industry that seems to be rather telling as to its poor state, is the number of people that think that it isn’t a problem that companies are misleading, lying, and outright scamming people, but it is a problem to point out that companies are doing those things. There have been plenty instances where people have told us that we shouldn’t be pointing out that companies are engaged in those types of practices. Keeping quiet about those things though is harmful as can be seen in what we recently found when looking at one of the ten most popular WordPress plugins, which has over 2+ million active installations according to wordpress.org.

When it comes to the WordPress security, one of the most repeated claims is that there are lots of brute force attacks against WordPress admin passwords. We have seen many security companies making that claim and then claiming that their plugin or service is the solution. The problem with this is that based on security companies own data, brute force attacks are not happening. For a type of attack that is happening, dictionary attacks, WordPress does a good job of helping to protect against them. That might be one reason why security companies are misleading people, since if they told the truth, it wouldn’t be reason for people to use their plugins and services. [Read more]