Yesterday we announced we have temporarily ended our notifications to the WordPress Plugin Directory when there are plugins with disclosed vulnerabilities in the current version of the plugin that is in the directory, until they put forward concrete plans to resolve two issues. One of those is finally warning people when they are using plugins that have been removed from the Plugin Directory for security issues. While years ago they claimed they were working on doing this, more recently they have claimed that doing so would put people at more risk. It is truly bizarre position to take just considering that many of these vulnerabilities have been publicly disclosed, so hackers would already have easy access to as much or more information than anyone has proposed including when warning webmasters of the issue. Then you have the fact that plenty of these vulnerabilities are not only known to hackers, but being actively exploited before the plugins were removed from the Plugin Directory (we know this because we have reported many of those to the Plugin Directory).

While that is really a black and white issue, when it comes to security many things are not like that. And in many cases actions do have serious unintended consequences that are not obvious. For example, we wouldn’t have though that the Plugin Directory doing a security review of a plugin after it has been removed for a security vulnerability could lead to putting the public at more risk, but that turned out to be the case as we recently found. [Read more]