To close out our first week of full disclosing vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins until the people on the WordPress side of things finally clean up the moderation of their Support Forum, we return back to something from the first day and a reminder of an example of why the Support Forum moderators behavior is harmful to actually improving security. We and others other often find additional vulnerabilities based on seeing reports of other vulnerabilities (and with our Plugin Security Checker tool we help find even more), so that makes the moderators deletion of reports of them on the Support Forum have a negative impact on improving security. Of course there is the other side of having the details of these vulnerabilities public, especially if they haven’t been fixed, but the best solution is to get them fixed. Once something has been disclosed it would be foolish to assume that people with bad intentions haven’t seen it, but the people on the WordPress side of things don’t seem to have a great grasp as to how the Internet works. Thus the most important thing is to make sure the vulnerability is fixed, but what seems to usually happen is that the moderators simply delete the reports and then don’t actually bother to notify anyone that could do anything about fixing the vulnerability. That was the case with the first plugin we full disclosed.

On Tuesday we discussed how Janek Vind’s report on reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in FV Flowplayer Video Player, lead to us check the 1,000 most popular plugins to get an idea of if there might be similar issues in other plugins while considering adding a check for some instances of them to our Plugin Security Checker. Through that we found just such a vulnerability in a plugin with 700,000+ active installations according to wordpress.org. We also added a check that would catch that to our Plugin Security Checker.
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