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Tag Archives: Andrew Nevins

12 Aug 2019

WordPress Support Forum Moderator Gets in Way of Users Dealing With Hack of Simple 301 Redirects – Addon – Bulk Uploader

When vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins get exploited a lot of those impacted don’t have a good understanding of what is going on. One example we have seen frequently with recent instances of that is that people get confused in to believing that the version that fixes the vulnerability instead contains malicious code that is causing the result of their website already having been hacked. That seems in part because they don’t understand that the new version doesn’t undo what the hackers have already accomplished. The best approach for people in that situation would be to hire a professionals like us to clean the website, since we can help to explain what is actually going on and make sure the issue has been fully resolved. The next best would be for people to discuss it on the support forum for the plugin, but as has happened with the plugin Simple 301 Redirects – Addon – Bulk Uploader that runs in to the problematic moderators of the WordPress Support Forum.

In a recent topic for the plugin someone asked a reasonable set of questions: [Read more]

7 May 2019

WordPress Support Forum Moderators Really Don’t Understand What Disclosure of a Vulnerability Is

One of the strange issues we have seen for years when it comes to the moderators of the WordPress Support Forum is them not understanding at all what disclosing a vulnerability is. That has even occurred with the person that is in charge of the team running the Plugin Directory, who certainly should have understood what is and isn’t disclosure of a vulnerability since they deal with vulnerabilities on a regular basis. That continues to be a problem. The latest instance involved a review of a plugin we mentioned yesterday in the context of people failing to keep their plugins up to date, which would have prevented them from being hacked. One of the reviews we cited part of, reads in full:

DO NOT USE THIS PLUGIN
This plugin left my company website vulnerable to an XSS attack on May 04, 2019 that caused visitors to be redirected to malicious spam websites. The issue was confirmed by multiple people, including WebARX Security. Excerpt from the WebARX writeup: [Read more]

29 Apr 2019

Are Security Journalists Going to Report on WordPress Leaving Tens of Thousands of Websites Vulnerable to Widely Exploited Vulnerability?

One of the ways that we keep track of publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins for our customers is by monitoring the WordPress Support Forum for relevant messages, over the weekend that notified us to a reply related to the plugin Related Posts:

@anevins but it’s been posted since 2 weeks and a few days ago and there isn’t any news from author. while it’s obvious where the hacker exploited the plugin it should take this long to fix it. [Read more]

17 Dec 2018

WordPress Plugin Directory Team Close Plugin Due to Fake Vulnerability Report

When it comes to inappropriate behavior of the moderators of the WordPress Support forum that has lead to us full disclosing vulnerabilities in protest until WordPress gets that situation cleaned up, that inappropriate behavior often has the impact of covering up problems created by those on the WordPress side of things. Whether they are intending to do that to cover up things or not isn’t clear, but the person that appears to be in charge of the moderation, Samuel “Otto” Wood, wears a number of other hats when it comes to WordPress, so there are obvious potential conflict of interest issues. One of the hats he wears is being a member of the six member team running the Plugin Directory, which screwed up in fairly obvious way a few days ago involving plugin CSS & JavaScript Toolbox and then a moderator shut down the possibility of pointing that out.

If you follow our blog you might have seen our post on Friday that mentioned that a false report of a vulnerability in that plugin and quite a few others. We explained the reason they were false as follows: [Read more]

30 Nov 2018

Closures of Very Popular WordPress Plugins, Week of November 30

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 those plugins were closed and then reopened. One of three was closed due to a vulnerability and another was closed due the security of the plugin, though there doesn’t appear to be any vulnerabilities related to that. That two thirds of those were for security issues is out of line with a broader claim made just today by a member of the team that handles the plugin that claimed that “most of the time when a plugin is delisted, it is not for a security issue.”. [Read more]