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Wordfence News

31 May 2019

Wordfence Premium Is Not Real-Time Protection

The company behind the Wordfence Security plugin is not by any means an honest company from what we have seen from over the years, so it wasn’t surprising for us torun across them advertising their payed service in a dishonest way. Yesterday we had noted that they appear to have left the public in the dark about an unfixed vulnerability in a WordPress plugin that was being exploited. After viewing Wordfence’s website while looking over that post we started getting re-targeted ads for their Wordfence Premium service and a lot of them.

By a lot, on just one page in one instance we served up five unique ads (plus multiple copies of the unique ads). What seems clearly to be key selling point is something that the security industry frequently uses to mislead people, which is promoting services as being “real-time”: [Read more]

30 May 2019

Did Wordfence Know They Were Keeping The Public in the Dark About Unfixed Vulnerability in WordPress Plugin Already Being Exploited?

We often find that the information provided about vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins presented by security companies and developers of the plugins is not telling the full story. Take a vulnerability that Wordfence disclosed yesterday. They don’t provide any explanation of how they came across it:

On Friday May 24th, our Threat Intelligence team identified a vulnerability present in Convert Plus, a commercial WordPress plugin with an estimated 100,000 active installs. [Read more]

8 May 2019

Wordfence Exposes Unfixed Vulnerability in WordPress Plugin in Post Criticizing Us for Doing the Same

The people behind the Wordfence Security plugin do some strange stuff. For example, in a recent post they again referred to us as an “unnamed security researcher”:

The file upload vulnerability was initially made public in a report by an unnamed security researcher, which was irresponsibly published on April 23rd without privately notifying the plugin’s author. [Read more]

11 Apr 2019

Actually Wordfence, It Doesn’t Look Like is_admin() Strikes Again

In our previous post we mentioned how Wordfence was lying about us related to a vulnerability in the plugin Related Posts (Yuzo Related Posts), but they also got something else wrong that is worth noting. One section of their post titled “is_admin() Strikes Again”. In that they write this:

Developers often mistakenly use is_admin() to check if a piece of code that requires administrative privileges should be run, but as the WordPress documentation points out, that isn’t how the function should be used. In this scenario self::_ini_() is called on any request to an administrative interface page, including /wp-admin/options-general.php and /wp-admin/admin-post.php, which allows a POST request to those pages to be processed by self::save_options(); later in the code. [Read more]

11 Apr 2019

Why Are Journalist Spreading Wordfence’s (aka Defiant’s) Lies About Us?

Here’s a timeline of the recent situation with the WordPress plugin Related Posts (Yuzo Related Posts):

Yet here was Lawrence Abrams at the Bleeping Computer yesterday: [Read more]

30 Mar 2019

WordPress Plugin Team Paints Target on Exploitable Settings Change Vulnerability That Permits Persistent XSS in Related Posts

When we announced a protest of the continued inappropriate behavior of the WordPress Support Forum moderators, one of the changes we suggested to resolve that was:

Don’t post on things they don’t understand. This really ties into the last item since you often have moderators providing people incorrect information and then they appear to not be able to handle that someone provides information that disputes that, leading to accurate information being deleted. [Read more]

22 Mar 2019

Does Wordfence Threat Analyst Really Not Know About All The Vulnerable Plugins Still in The WordPress Plugin Directory?

When it comes to trying to improve security surrounding WordPress two of the big problems are inaccurate information being spread by security companies and journalists, and often they are combined. As an example of that, an article popped up the other day for the Google News alert we have set to keep track of coverage of plugin vulnerabilities (which we previously mentioned in the context of another inaccurate claim, that 90 percent of websites hacked last year were running WordPress). Part of that article, which quotes someone from the company behind the most popular WordPress security plugin, Wordfence Security is as follows:

All new plugins are checked by WordPress before being added to the public repository, but the same doesn’t apply to updates. [Read more]

9 Nov 2018

Wordfence Security and Wordfence Premium Fail To Protect Websites, But Defiant Is Happy to Lie and Tell You Otherwise

Over at our main business we have a steady stream of people contacting us to ask if we offer a service that will stop their websites from being hacked, a not insignificant number of them mention that they are currently using a service that claimed to do that and there website got hacked anyway. That second item obviously tells you that these service don’t necessarily work, but what seems more relevant to the poor state of security is that even when one of these doesn’t work these people are often sure that they can and do work, just the one they used didn’t. That probably goes a long way to explaining why the complete lack of evidence that these services are effective at all hasn’t been an impediment to people using them. The problem with that is not only do they end up not working well or at all, but the money spent on them could have been spent on services that actually improve security of these websites (and everyone else’s website if there services is anything like ours), but are not sold on false promises.

Seeing as there are lots of people that still haven’t gotten the message about these services should be avoided if there isn’t evidence that shows effectiveness, we thought it would be worth emphasizing and expanding on something we mentioned in a post yesterday where websites could have been protected by doing one of the basics of security, keeping WordPress plugins up to date, while a security service failed to protect them while being promoted as being able to do that. [Read more]

8 Nov 2018

Unlike Wordfence and Other Security Providers We Warned About WP GDPR Compliance Before Websites Started to Get Hacked

When it comes to protecting WordPress websites against vulnerabilities in plugins we provide a level of protection that others don’t for the simple reason that we do the work they don’t (but that they absolutely should be doing). The result can be seen with the plugin WP GDPR Compliance, which had multiple vulnerabilities fixed in version 1.4.3.

We had been warning our customers of one of those before you could even normally upgrade to that version of the plugin as the plugin was closed at the time (we warned our customers that it was at high likelihood of exploitation). At that time we could have help our customers to upgrade to 1.4.3 and then shortly after we started warning them the plugin was re-opened and they could upgrade normally. That all occurred yesterday. [Read more]

19 Oct 2018

You Shouldn’t Assume That Wordfence Security or Other Security Tools Actually Provide Effective Protection

When it comes to explaining how so much money is spent on security while the results of that spending don’t seem to be appearing, a lot of the explanation seems like it can be found in the almost complete lack of evidence that those products and services marketed as providing protection provide effective protection. Considering that those are often promoted with extraordinary claims of their capabilities that seems to indicate those claims are baseless or that the developers actually know that they are false since if they actually had evidence to support them it seems unlikely they wouldn’t present that.

Everything we have seen over the years is there really is a lack of effectiveness and some combination of a lack of understanding by their developers that they are not effective and developers not caring if they do since they can make a lot of money while selling something that doesn’t have to work well (if at all). Certainly one of those would apply to the company behind the tied for most popular WordPress security plugin, Wordfence Security (the reality behind the other plugin is also telling about popularity not equally providing good security). For example, they previously very prominently claimed that their plugin “stops you from getting hacked” without any qualification (and still make the claims less prominently), despite that simply being false. [Read more]