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 one of those vulnerabilities, an authenticated option update vulnerability in the plugin WP Courses. That allows a logged in attacker to change arbitrary WordPress options and they could use that to create a new WordPress account with administrator privileges. There are probably more vulnerabilities with similar code still lurking in plugins, as this was caught by a recent expansion of our motioning for that type of vulnerability. That vulnerability has been in the plugin for 22 months, without being noticed it appears.

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