One way we help to improve the security of WordPress plugins, not just for our 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 a variant of those vulnerabilities, an authenticated option update vulnerability in the plugins Stop Generating Unnecessary Thumbnails, which has 40,000+ installs, and CoDesigner, which has 20,000+ installs. Those plugins are from the same developer, so other plugins from them might be affected as well. This is also the second time our proactive monitoring has identified fairly serious vulnerabilities in the plugins (the previous instances involved separate vulenrabilities).

We now are also running all the plugins used by customers through that on a weekly basis to provide additional protection for our customers. [Read more]