We recently have been trying to get an idea of how effective it would be to try to proactively catch some vulnerabilities when changes are made to WordPress plugins that include those vulnerabilities. In doing one of the preliminary checks we immediately came across a reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that exists in the plugin Product Catalog that has existed since its first version was released nearly four years ago.
Contrary the scaremongering we have seen from other web security companies this type of vulnerability isn’t a major concern as we don’t see hackers trying to exploit it on a large scale and all major web browsers other than Firefox have filtering that would need to be evaded to make it work. At the same this type of vulnerability shouldn’t be remaining in a plugin that long as it involves a failure of security at a fairly basic level and in the form it was here, easy to detect. [Read more]