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Tag Archives: WP Construction Mode

18 Jan 2019

Closures of Very Popular WordPress Plugins, Week of January 18

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 three of these plugins was closed and none of them have been reopened. [Read more]

16 Jan 2019

One of the 1,000 Most Popular WordPress Plugins Contains a CSRF/XSS Vulnerability

Among the many things we do to provide our customers with the best data on vulnerabilities in any WordPress plugins they use is that we keep track of any of the 1,000 most popular plugins being closed on the WordPress Plugin Directory in case that might be due to a security vulnerability. Yesterday one of those plugins, WP Construction Mode, was closed. No reason has been given for that closure so far, but in just our quick check over the plugin we found a security vulnerability that could have led to it being removed, that is a cross-site request forgery (CSRF)/cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability when saving the plugin’s settings.

Due to the moderators of the WordPress Support Forum’s continued inappropriate behavior we are full disclosing vulnerabilities in protest until WordPress gets that situation cleaned up, so we are releasing this post and then only trying to notify the developer through the WordPress Support Forum. You can notify the developer of this issue on the forum as well. Hopefully the moderators will finally see the light and clean up their act soon, so these full disclosures will no longer be needed (we hope they end soon). You would think they would have already done that since a previously full disclosed vulnerability was quickly on hackers’ radar, but it appears those moderators have such disdain for the rest of the WordPress community that their continued ability to act inappropriate is more important that what is best for the rest of the community. [Read more]