One of the ways we help to improve the security of WordPress plugins, not just for the customers of our service, but for everyone using them, is our proactive monitoring of changes made to plugins in the Plugin Directory to try to catch serious vulnerabilities. Through that we caught an authenticated persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the plugin Youtube Showcase (YouTube Gallery). That is a type of vulnerability appears to have been a type that hackers have been looking for undisclosed vulnerabilities to exploit recently, so finding it before them is a very good thing.

The vulnerability is due to multiple security failures, as if often the case. The plugin registers the function emd_insert_new_shc() to be accessible by those logged in to WordPress: [Read more]