If you were not too familiar with the security industry you would probably assume that if a company is the developer of a WordPress security plugin then other plugins they make would be quite secure. That turns out to not be the case with the developer of the Security Ninja plugin. Yesterday we full disclosed a minor vulnerability in one their other plugins, Google Maps Widget, which has 100,000+ installs according to WordPress.org. Then today we saw that they fixed a similar issue in another of their plugins, Minimal Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode, which has 60,000+ installs. In a reminder of how insecure some plugins are (even if the developer also has a security plugin), when we looked at the code being changed to fix that we noticed that in the same function there is another more serious vulnerability, one that wasn’t fixed.

The vulnerability allows anyone logged in to WordPress to disable the website by enabling the plugin’s maintenance mode. The vulnerability would also allow an attacker that gets someone logged in to WordPress that clicks a link the attacker creates to cause the website to be disabled as well. That is due to the failure of the developer to implement two rather basic security checks in the code. [Read more]