We release advisories warning about WordPress plugin developers who have a repeated track record of failing to handle security well. A reasonable question to ask is if a backward-looking determination is helpful or if past is not prologue with that. A week ago, we looked at an example of a developer continuing to fail that we ran across. This week we ran across another test of this, as two developers we have released advisories for have new plugins available in the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Awesome Motive

For one of those developers, Awesome Motive, we just issued our advisory on December 11. Nine days later, they introduced the plugin WPConsent to the WordPress Plugin Directory. The issue that led to us finally issuing that advisory was a continued failure to address AJAX accessible functions lacking a capability check in the 6+ million install plugin WPForms, even after fixing a vulnerability caused by that. That is really basic security, so a major plugin developer shouldn’t be failing on that front. Yet it also is the case with WPConsent. [Read more]