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 two of those plugins were closed and both of them have not been reopened.

WP SVG Icons

The plugin WP SVG Icons, which has 50,000+ installs, was closed on Saturday. By the time we were checking into the closure a new version that fixed a cross-site request forgery (CSRF)/arbitrary file upload vulnerability had been released. There are still a couple of very minor cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities in the plugin.

Facebook Widget (Widget for Facebook Page Feeds)

The plugin Facebook Widget (Widget for Facebook Page Feeds), which has 100,000+ installs, was closed yesterday. No reason has been given for the closure, though it could have to do with use of Facebook in its name based on a closure last week. We found that it contains an authenticated persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability.