Brand new WordPress plugins are supposed to go through a security review before being allowed in the Plugin Directory. Either those reviews are not happening or they are failing to catch things that should have been caught. Take the plugin Prevent Files / Folders Access, which we came across due our proactive monitoring of changes made to plugins in the Plugin Directory to try to catch serious vulnerabilities flagging that it contains a cross-site request forgery (CSRF)/arbitrary file deletion vulnerability.

We have long offered to provide the team running the Plugin Directory help to have a capability similar to that monitoring. Running the plugin through our Plugin Security Checker would have warned about that as well. We have also long offered the team running the Plugin Directory free access to the advanced mode of that tool for free. We haven’t heard any interest from that team to either of those offers. [Read more]