One of the ways we help to improve the security of WordPress plugins, not just for our customers, but for everyone using them, is the proactive monitoring of changes made to plugins in the Plugin Directory to try to catch serious vulnerabilities. That again has lead to us catching a vulnerability in a fairly popular plugin, of a type that hackers are likely to exploit if they know about it. In this case the vulnerability is much worse because it was previously fixed, so some hacker could still be trying to exploit it based on the previous instance of it. Since the check used to spot this is also included in our Plugin Security Checker (which  is now accessible through a WordPress plugin of its own), it is another of reminder of how that can help to indicate which plugins are in greater need of security review (for which we do as part of our service as well as separately).

Back in September we noticed that PHP object injection vulnerability had been fixed the plugin Welcart e-Commerce, which has 10,000+ active installations according to wordpress.org (who had discovered vulnerability that wasn’t disclosed). That had been fixed by replacing the usage of unserialze() with json_decode() in version 1.9.4. The relevant line had previously looked like this (in the file /classes/usceshop.class.php): [Read more]