While we already are far ahead of other companies in keeping up with vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins (amazingly that isn’t an exaggeration), in looking in to how we could get even better we noticed that in an instances where a vulnerability was exploited in a plugin, we probably could have warned our customers about the vulnerability even sooner if we had looked at the plugin when it was first closed on the Plugin Directory instead of when the vulnerability was fixed (though as far as we are aware the exploitation started after we had warned our customers of the fix). So we are now monitoring to see if any of the 1,000 most popular plugins are closed on the Plugin Directory and then seeing if it looks like that was because of a vulnerability.

Today the plugin qTranslate X, which has 100,000+ installs, was closed. No reason has been given for the closure. While we didn’t find any obvious serious security issues in a quick check, what we did find is that the plugin is insecure and some of that insecurity is hard to follow, so it is possible that it has a more serious issue that is difficult to spot. [Read more]