While we think that our service provides the best data on vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins, for many websites paying for a service to warn about the use of vulnerable plugins is probably not in the cards. You can always use the companion plugin for our service, which includes data on vulnerabilities in plugins that are being targeted by hackers. But what if you are looking for more broad based vulnerability data? That is where data from the WPScan Vulnerability Database can be good alternative, since there is no cost for access to their data (though some services actually charge for accessing that data). It is important to note that their data has some serious quality issues, including it not warning about vulnerabilities that are included our plugin’s data despite that being for vulnerabilities that are being exploited and the data being freely accessible (if you use a plugin or service that uses their data you will want to combine it with our plugin to protect you from this situation).

There are a number of plugins that provide access to that data, but as we found yesterday while preparing a post about another problem with WPScan’s data, not all of those plugins are equal and in the case of one them it is not providing important warnings. [Read more]