Last week we disclosed a settings change vulnerability in the plugin Search Exclude after it had been closed on the WordPress Plugin Directory and noted that wasn’t the only probable issue:
There also appear to be other security issues with the plugin. [Read more]
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 a recent instance were 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 due to a vulnerability.
This week four of those plugins were closed and three of them have not been reopened. [Read more]
The plugin Search Exclude was closed on the WordPress Plugin Directory on Friday. That is one of the 1,000 most popular plugins with 30,000+ installs, so we were alerted to its closure. While we were looking in to the plugin to see if there were any serious vulnerabilities we should be warning users of the plugin that also use our service, we found that it contains a less serious one related to a more serious one, a settings change vulnerability.
The plugin registers the function saveOptions() to run during admin_init: [Read more]