Auttomattic Sponsored WordPress Plugin Pods Still Hasn’t Fixed Publicly Known Security Vulnerability After Two Months

In discussing how the security of WordPress plugins could be improved we have put forward that Automattic, the company closely connected with WordPress, should have some responsibility for that. With a valuation of over billion dollars they certainly have the financial wherewithal to bear the burden of some responsibility. Shortly after putting forward that idea that we came across a security advisory for multiple vulnerabilities in Pods, a plugin that Automattic sponsors.

When we checked on the vulnerabilities to add them to Plugin Vulnerabilities plugin we found that despite the advisory saying that they were fixed in version 2.5, that in fact two reflective cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities listed still existed. Three days after the advisory was put out, January 15, we notified the Pods developers that vulnerabilities still existed. We promptly received a reply from them, but it didn’t seem like they really understood the situation.

A week later versions 2.5.1 and 2.5.1.1 were released, neither of which addressed the security vulnerabilities.

On February 5 and 9 we received emails from the developers that the vulnerabilities would be fixed in version 2.5.2. That version has yet to be released and it has now been two months that they have knowingly left the vulnerabilities in the plugin. Maybe this will be a wake-up call to Automattic that plugin security needs to be taken more seriously and that they can start playing a constructive role by improving the security of plugins they sponsor.

We Have Now Helped Get 16 WordPress Plugin Vulnerabilities Fixed

It has now been a little over three months since we introduced our Plugin Vulnerabilities plugin amid our renewed effort to improve the security of WordPress plugin and it seems like a good time to provide on what we have accomplished so far. For years we have discussing the problem that many publicly disclosed vulnerabilities existed in the current version of WordPress plugins and that those plugins were still available on the WordPress.org Plugin Directory. That obviously is bad sign for the overall security of WordPress plugins since making sure that known vulnerabilities get fixed is a low rung of making sure that plugins are secure. In the past we hadn’t kept track of how many of these vulnerabilities we had some part in getting fixed, but when we started working on the new plugin we started tracking that. This week two more of the plugins got fixes bringing the total to 16 vulnerabilities fixed in as many plugins. Developers of two more plugins have indicated that vulnerabilities in their plugin will be fixed in upcoming releases.

One of the vulnerabilities fixed this week gives an indication of how poor the situation still is years after we first noticed it. Back on September 1 a vulnerability was publicly disclosed in the Easy Media Gallery plugin, which has 10,000+ active installs. The person disclosing the vulnerability decided not to inform the developers beforehand and it would appear no one else bothered to either considering that a fix was released within two day of us informing them on Monday. It wasn’t a case that no one else saw the post as there are several comments and two follow up posts have comments from people complaining the discoverer is not informing developers of the vulnerabilities.

The first comment on that post ties into another troubling issue that we have seen in the vulnerabilities fixed. The commentor mentions that they would inform the developers of WPScan, which they describe as a ” black box WordPress vulnerability scanner”, of the vulnerabilities. The commentor did in fact do that.  It would appear that WPScan folks didn’t inform the developer of the vulnerability either. That certainly wouldn’t be the first time, as previously discussed in another situation they disclosed a serious vulnerability in a plugin but didn’t bother to inform the developer, which meant that like this vulnerability, it wasn’t fixed. We also found that they put vulnerabilities in their database, but don’t inform the developers of them, so that people with malicious intent are aware of vulnerabilities but everyone else is left vulnerable.

While just informing the developers of the vulnerabilities can in many cases get the vulnerability fixed quickly we have found that in other cases that isn’t enough. For example, in the case of the Xcloner plugin it required the Plugin Directory having removed the plugin, after we reported it to them, for the developer to finally fix the vulnerability. In other cases we have found that despite discoverer of the vulnerability and the developer of the plugin saying the vulnerability had been fixed, it actually wasn’t. But our checking, done while determining what versions are vulnerable when adding the vulnerability to the Plugin Vulnerabilities plugin, have led to the vulnerabilities actually getting fixed.

If you run across a report of a vulnerability in the current version of a WordPress plugin please make sure to inform the developer of the plugin and or the people running the Plugin Directory. You can also let us know by leaving a message in the support forum for Plugin Vulnerabilities or sending an email to pluginvulnerabilities@whitefirdesign.com, which will allow us to add the vulnerability to our plugin and make sure that the vulnerability is handled properly.

Many WordPress Plugin Vulnerabilities Have Not Been Fixed

As of today’s release, our Plugin Vulnerabilities plugin includes entries for 200 security vulnerabilities that have existed in WordPress plugins. While that is far from all of the vulnerabilities out there, it does include a good mix of vulnerabilities. So far we have focused on adding newly discovered vulnerabilities, vulnerabilities that we are seeing exploit attempts for, and vulnerabilities from the archives of security researchers. We have included some stats we collected on those vulnerabilities below.

One stat stands out, over a quarter of the vulnerabilities – 54 of 200 – have not been fixed. A few of these were only recently discovered or the developer was only recently informed of them (all too often no one bothers to inform the developer and this is something that our work on the plugin has been rectifying), but for the vast majority there has been ample time and notice to the developer so they should have been fixed by now. This is a big problem because simply keeping plugins up to date won’t protect you if the latest version of the plugin has a known security vulnerability that can be exploited.

Right now what happens when a vulnerability isn’t fixed is that the plugin will be removed from the WordPress.org Plugin Directory until it is fixed, assuming the people running the Plugin Directory are informed of the issue. That does nothing for any websites that already have the plugin installed though. It is a problem we have been highlighting for three years now, without getting a solution. It also has been over two years since there was indication that a solution was being worked on. We hope that it won’t take another year to finally get fixed. In the meantime you can use our Plugin Vulnerabilities plugin to get alerted to known vulnerabilities in installed plugins and our No Longer in Directory plugin to find out what installed plugins have been removed from the WordPress.org Plugin Directory.

Plugin Vulnerability Stats As of March 2, 2015

  • 200 vulnerabilities included
  • 54 included vulnerabilities are in the most recent version of plugins (49 of these plugins have been removed from the Plugin Directory)
  • 14 vulnerabilities have been fixed in part due to our work on this plugin
  • 5 included vulnerabilities in security plugins
  • Top vulnerability types:
    • cross-site request forgery (CSRF)/cross-site scripting (XSS): 49 vulnerabilities
    • reflected cross-site scripting (XSS): 39 vulnerabilities
    • unrestricted file upload: 31 vulnerabilities
    • arbitrary file viewing: 16 vulnerabilities
    • SQL injection: 15 vulnerabilities
  • Top vulnerability discoverers:

WordPress.org Makes It Harder For Security Journalists to Hype WordPress Plugin Vulnerabilities

Last Wednesday we discussed an ongoing issues where security journalist conflate WordPress plugin’s download count at WordPress.org with how many websites are using the plugin, making a vulnerability seem like it has much larger impact than it actual it does. In the case last week the headlines proclaimed things like “More than 1 million WordPress websites imperiled by critical plugin bug” about a security vulnerability that existed in older versions of WP Slimstat, beyond explaining the fact that the security vulnerability in question was unlikely to be widely exploited, we pointed out that the website count used was way off base. The journalist were taking the 1.3 million downloads the plugin had and using that to back up their claim on over 1 million websites impacted, which they shouldn’t have since it isn’t close to being appropriate substitute for an actual count of use.

Over the weekend WordPress.org made a change that should stop this, as they started displaying a count of Active Installs in addition to download counts for WordPress plugins. In the case of the WP Slimstat plugin the actual number of websites using it is much less than a million, with the Active Installs listed at 100,000+:

wp-slimstat-active-installs

Hopefully this will be a wake-up call to some of those journalist that they need to stop taking so many liberties when reporting on WordPress plugin security issues, since this isn’t the only problem that there has been with their coverage of the issue (which could use more quality coverage).

One Easy Step To Hype A WordPress Plugin’s Security Vulnerabilty

We would love to see more quality press attention to the issue of WordPress plugin security because there certainly is much discuss, unfortunately, as with security journalism in general, when it does get discussed these days the reporting is mostly awful. Take for instance the Ars Technica article More than 1 million WordPress websites imperiled by critical plugin bug (written by the same person who last year wrote an article that we found to be completely baseless).

The words imperiled and critical are probably not appropriate, considering that the vulnerability in WP Slimstat was fixed in an update last week (you can turn of WordPress ability to automatically updates plugins with one of our plugins) and due to the type of vulnerability. The vulnerability is a blind SQL injection vulnerability, which can allow data to be read out of the database. While this has the potential to be rather serious if you store sensitive data on the website, this type of vulnerability isn’t often exploited by hackers that are not targeting specific websites (most hacks are not targeted). So the chances of it being exploited are rather small in comparison to say a vulnerability that allows PHP files to be uploaded to a website, which we can almost guarantee is going to be exploited, most likely sooner rather than later. The chances of this plugins vulnerability being exploited are even slimmer because it requires a fair amount computing being done before you can exploit it, unlike plenty of other blind SQL injections that have been found in WordPress plugins.

The big problem with the article comes from the claim in the title that “more than 1 million WordPress websites imperiled”. Over a million websites impacted make this sounds like a major issue, the problem is that it isn’t close to being true. If you read through the article nothing is provided that backs that number up, instead only the download count of the plugin is mentioned:

WP-Slimstat is an analytics tool. Its listing on WordPress shows it has been downloaded more than 1.3 million times. People who operate websites that use the plugin should update immediately.

Downloads of software obviously are not the same as how many websites are using software, so treating them the same is something a journalist concerned about accuracy wouldn’t be doing. But what makes it so bad for WordPress plugins is that each time a plugin gets updated through the WordPress admin area that counts as new download, so the actual user count is going to be much smaller than the download count, especially if the plugin is updated frequently. The download graph for one of our plugins dramatically shows how updates impact the download count:

download-count-graph

You see that huge spike that on the graph, that is when we updated the plugin. On that day there were 148 downloads and the next day there 47 the next day. That compares to 9 downloads a day we averaged over the last week. Those two days work out to 13 percent of total downloads so far.

WP Slimstat is updated more often so there are lots of spikes on the graph, of which, most if not all are due to updates:

wp-slimstat-download-graph

Ars Technica isn’t alone in this, a quick search pulled up more articles on this vulnerability with the same highly inflated website use count:

It also worth mentioning that this type of article has the potential to be somewhat harmful to security since you need to being keeping your WordPress plugins update to date all the time instead of trying to be on the lookout for mentions of fixed security issues since security fixes often are not even mentioned in plugins’ changelogs.

WordFence Really Doesn’t Know What They Are Talking About

One of the biggest problems we see with improving the security of websites is the amount of bad information out there, as it is hard to start to address the underlying problems when so much of what is being said is wrong. What surprised us when we started dealing with security issues is how much of that bad information comes from security companies. We don’t have the time to go through every instance of this since it is so widespread, but it is worth looking at an example of a company putting out bad information from time to time when a larger security issue is also raised.

On February 11, security researcher Claudio Viviani publicly disclosed a SQL injection vulnerability in the WordPress plugin WORDPRESS VIDEO GALLERY. According to his advisory he had notified the developer of the plugin about the issue two days before that. The next Tuesday we added the vulnerability to our Plugin Vulnerabilities plugin and on Friday, after waiting a few days to give time to the developer to release the fix, we notified the people running the WordPress.org Plugin Directory of that the vulnerability existed and had not been fixed. Following that the plugin was pulled from the directory. Earlier today they let us know the plugin had been removed and that the fixed version should be available soon. While checking to confirm that issue was fixed in the new version, which it was, we came across a forum thread that linked to a WordFence, which sells a WordPress security service, blog post entitled Zero Day SQL Injection Vulnerability in WordPress Video Gallery.

The problems with their blog post start with the title. This vulnerability wasn’t a zero day vulnerability since that involves a vulnerability being exploited before the developer or the public knows about the vulnerability. That wasn’t the case here as the vulnerability was publicly disclosed a week before and it appears the developer knew about it before that. The implications of a zero day vulnerability are much different than what this actually is, so the distinction is important. Zero day vulnerabilities do get more press coverage, so you might ask if they characterized it that way to try to get them attention.

That wasn’t the end of the problems, it continues into the content of the post:

There is currently a zero day SQL injection vulnerability in the WordPress Video Gallery plugin. Our researchers are seeing exploits in the wild for this and the exploits claim the vendor has been notified on the 9th of February.

If you click the “exploits in the wild” link what you get is not anything to do with exploits of the vulnerability in the wild, instead it is a copy of Claudio Viviani’s advisory on the Exploit Database website. The advisory itself doesn’t provide any code to exploit vulnerability. The proof of concept (POC) given simply shows where the SQL injection code would go:

http://target/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=rss&type=video&vid=[SQLi]

It doesn’t include any malicious SQL code and providing the POC doesn’t really make much difference in exploiting the vulnerability since with the details of the vulnerability someone should be able to recreated the provided POC quite easily.

You really have to wonder about the competency of the WordFence researchers when they are claiming that a security advisory is somehow evidence of “exploits in the wild”.

Also in that section they half acknowledge the developer was notified of the vulnerability ahead of the exploitation, which would mean that this isn’t a zero day vulnerability as they are claiming.

The plugin still has not been updated by the vendor. Because this is being exploited actively and the vendor has been notified, we are now publicly disclosing the existence of this vulnerability.

WordFence isn’t actually publicly disclosing anything since the person that discovered the vulnerability already did that, it isn’t clear if they don’t know what public disclosure actually is or if they are intentionally trying to take credit for something they didn’t do.

A ‘googledork’ is also available in the exploit which allows attackers to use Google to find sites which suffer from this vulnerability in order to exploit them.

While this might sound ominous it doesn’t really mean much, the “googledork” in this case is simply a search query that shows URLs in Google’s index that are from RSS feature of this plugin. Here it is from the advisory:

# Dork Google: inurl:/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=rss

Again this doesn’t actually matter much since all the search query does is show indexed URLs that contain the start of the path that is exploited:

http://target/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=rss&type=video&vid=[SQLi]

Protecting Against Unfixed Vulnerabilities in WordPress Plugins

The situation with this plugin does get to a real problem, how do we protect against websites being hacked when known vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins are not fixed. WordFence’s solution beyond reporting the issue to the Plugin Directory, seems to be more effective at promoting their website then dealing with this type of situation:

Please share/tweet/mail this to your fellow WordPress administrators to help create awareness about this serious issue.

We have been pushing for a better approach to handling than this type of situation for years, which would involve WordPress warning admins when an installed plugin has been removed from the Plugin Directory (if you would like to see that happen please vote for it on the WordPress Ideas website). Until that happens you can use our No Longer in Directory plugin that provides a more limited version of that functionality. For this type of situation though one of our other plugins, Plugin Vulnerabilities, is more useful. This plugin warns when installed plugins have known security issue and also provides information on vulnerabilities that existed in other versions, which is useful when cleaning up a hacked WordPress website. Last Tuesday we updated the plugin to warn about this security vulnerability, so if you had our plugin installed and you had version 2.7 of the WORDPRESS VIDEO GALLERY plugin installed you would have then seen the following warning on the Installed Plugins page:

Plugin Vulnerabilities Screenshot

Lessons from the FancyBox for WordPress Plugin Vulnerability

Last week a vulnerability in the WordPress plugin Fancybox for WordPress was exploited causing many websites to serve malware. A week later we thought it would be a good time to look at what went wrong and what lessons can be taken from the incident to hopefully improve WordPress plugin security going forward.

WordPress Plugin Security is in Bad Shape

When we started to look in to this, what we were most interested to see was what was the underlying vulnerability that allowed the websites to be hacked. Was it some obscure corner case that allowed a hacker access they shouldn’t have or was it some very fundamental failure? Since the developer stated they fixed the vulnerability in version 3.0.3 looking at the changes in that version was the starting place for understanding that. What the changes made show is that anyone could change the plugin’s settings. By anyone we truly me anyone, you didn’t have to be logged in to WordPress to change the settings. This wasn’t the intention of the developer, as can be see by the fact that only logged in users who are Administrators can access the plugin’s settings page.

The problematic code is the code for saving the settings, which did not check to make sure that the settings change came from the setting’s page. In 3.0.2 the code simply checked if a request for a setting updates was sent and then went on to save the settings:

if ( isset($_REQUEST[‘action’]) && ‘update’ == $_REQUEST[‘action’] ) {

The changed code in 3.0.3 checks to see where the request came from as well:

if ( isset($_REQUEST[‘action’]) && ‘reset’ == $_REQUEST[‘action’] && check_admin_referer( ‘mfbfw-options-options’ ) ) {

In many cases being able to change a plugin’s settings would not allow it to be used to serve malware. What allowed it in this cases is that the plugin has settings that allow additional code to be added to pages in which FancyBox for WordPress is present:

Fancybox for WordPress Extra Calls Settings Page

All the hacker had to do was to update the settings to turn on that feature and have it use their malicious code.

The fact that a plugin that now has over 600,000 downloads (each time an installed plugin is updated in WordPress that gets included in the download count, so the amount of websites using it is much lower) allowed anyone to change it’s settings and a hacker was the first person to discover this isn’t a good sign for the security of WordPress plugins. We think that Automattic has at least some responsibility for improving this situation.

The response after the fact was much better. The vulnerability was quickly fixed and WordPress automatically pushed the updated version for those running at least WordPress 3.7 (which introduced automatic updates)

Understanding the Scope of Vulnerability

When dealing with a hacked website an important element in the cleanup process is understanding the scope of the exploitation, so that appropriate cleanup action is taken. While it doesn’t hurt to do more than what is needed, it can take more time and increase expenses, which can be a major hardship depending on the website.

In this case the direct impact of the vulnerability is somewhat limited. The hacker is able to add code to the setting and that is loaded on pages on the website but because the setting is stored in the database safely using the update_option function they can not otherwise gain access the database through the vulnerability. It is possible for malicious JavaScript to provide the hacker additional access to the website if an admin was to have visited a page that has the code on it while logged in.

Once a website upgraded to at least version 3.0.4, any malicious code currently stored in the setting is disabled and the vulnerability is patched, so the website should be secure at that point, but you may want take the precautionary measures of changing the passwords associated with the website and checking over the website for malicious code or reverting the website to a backup made before the website was originally hacked.

The Settings API

When looking at how to improve code security, hoping that people will start writing secure code on their own isn’t a good bet. Some combination of making it easier to do things securely and making it harder to write insecure code seems to be an important element to improving the situation.

So could be something be done to deal with this type of situation? There already is a way to handle saving settings securely, the Settings API, which was introduced in WordPress 2.7. This API handles managing settings and only allows settings to be saved by users with manage_options capability, which is normally only given to Administrators (and Super Admins when using MultiSite). The problem with it is that it doesn’t appear to be used in many plugins (that includes our plugin with a settings page, which we are looking to rectify). It would be worth looking in to how to make it so that it is more widely used going forward.

Security Journalism is in Bad Shape

You don’t have to follow IT security closely to know that it isn’t in good shape these days, with major company after company revealing that sensitive customer data has been breached. Good IT security journalism could be an important piece of shining a light on bad practices (which are abundant) and ultimately getting security where it should be. Unfortunately, what we have found is that security journalism is in as bad or worse shape than the security they cover. Take for instance The Register’s article on the situation with this plugin. It misses many important details, like the fact the plugin was being automatically updated for many and that the update would take care of much of the issue. It then follows that up with some truly bad reporting:

The vulnerability followed what was described as the “most serious” hole in five years, disclosed last November, that affected what was then estimated to be 86 per cent of WordPress websites. That cross-site scripting hole was found in the hugely-popular WP-Statistics plugin.

First off we have yet to see any impact from the vulnerability that is mentioned as being the “most serious” hole in five years, its limited impact would be something to mention several months after it was fixed in outdated installs (the current version at the time was not vunerable, which would have been worth mentioning as well). The bigger mistake is that the author of the article is conflating a vulnerability in WordPress itself with an unrelated vulnerability in the the WP-Statistics plugin, despite having also written the article they are citing about the previous vulnerability.

Poor Security In Automattic Sponsored WordPress Plugin

A couple of weeks ago we discussed our opinion that Automattic, the company closely associated with WordPress, should bear some of the responsibility for improving the security of WordPress plugins. That came up after we bumped in to their use of WordPress plugins for the WordPress.com VIP service, while trying track down the developer of a plugin to let them know of a security issue. It was only days later that we came across a closer connection between Automattic and the poor security of WordPress plugin.

As part of our efforts to improve the security of WordPress plugins we have created the Plugin Vulnerabilities plugin that alerts when the currently installed version of plugins have known security vulnerabilities (as well as listing vulnerabilities that existed in installed plugins). When we add vulnerabilities to the dataset for that plugin we verify that vulnerability exists and what versions it existed in, in some instances we have found that vulnerabilities that discoverer of the vulnerability and or the developer of the plugin claim have been fixed have not actually been fixed. That is the case with two reflective cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities recently identified in the Pods plugin. While the report says that the vulnerabilities were fixed in version 2.5, we found that they still existed in that version. While looking for a way to contact the developers to let them know that issue existed and had been publicly disclosed, we noticed that footer of the website prominently displays that the project is sponsored by Automattic:

Pods Sponsored by Automattic

According to their About page, Automattic has been sponsoring development since 2012.

After a little more digging we were able to find Pods recommend method for reporting a security issue. While we got a quick response it didn’t seem like they really understood things. In our initial contact we recommended they use Firefox when confirming the vulnerabilities still exist, due to XSS filtering in other major web browsers that would protect against the example exploits of the vulnerabilities that were provided in the advisory (the XSS filtering would not necessarily protect against more advanced exploits). In response they asked how they could confirm them in Chrome for some reason. A week later two new version, 2.5.1 and 2.5.1.1, were released that based on the changelog fixed a number of bugs, but did not fix the security vulnerabilities that have been publicly available since January 12. As of today the vulnerabilities still exist in the plugin.

In reviewing the other vulnerabilities that were included in that report another thing stuck out to us, the security of Pods has actually gotten worse over time. One of the other vulnerabilities could have lead to all the of Pods data being deleted from a website if a malicious actor could get a logged in admin to visit a specified page through a cross site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability. That vulnerability existed back to version 2.0, but as of at least the last version of 1.x series the reset function was protected from this type of vulnerability with a nonce.

Automattic’s Responsibility for the Security of WordPress Plugins

As we have continued to refocus on the security of WordPress plugins due to our work on new plugin that warns of known vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins the question of who has a responsibility for improving the security of WordPress plugins has come up. Relying on the developers of the plugins to insure they are secure doesn’t seem to be working as many of the vulnerabilities we have reviewed are things that are not the result of complex issues, so they could have been prevented with relatively basic security precautions. Since WordPress is a volunteer effort expecting that those volunteers would be responsible for the overall security of third-party software doesn’t see right. But what about the company closely connected with WordPress, Automattic? With a valuation of over billion dollars they certainly have the financial wherewithal to bear the burden of some responsibility, but in the past we would have said no since they didn’t seem to have a direct connection with plugins, but as we recently stumbled upon they are taking advantage of them for business purposes.

Recently a reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability was discovered in the Frontend Uploader plugin. After confirming that the vulnerability existed in the most recent version we went looking for a way to contact the developer of the plugin to alert that the vulnerability existed in their plugin. While doing that we came across a page for the plugin at Automattic’s  Wordpress.com VIP, a service where you can pay starting amounts of $5,000 a month for hosting and $1,250 for support. It turns out they offer a number of the plugins from the wordpress.org Plugin Directory to the customers of their VIP service. They tout those plugins (as partner integration) with this:

We’ve added 200+ extra features on top of WordPress for everyone on WordPress.com—and just for VIPs, we’ve added the additional plugins below, which can be integrated into your sites with a single-click, so you can take advantage of powerful partner integrations and features without touching a line of code.

Their marketing materials also touts their claimed security (which hopefully has improved after the major breach they had a few years ago):

We stay awake at night, watching over your site, so you don’t have to. Our site monitoring and secure codebase ensure an impressive uptime, and our operations team is always hands-on.

Based on all of this we certainly think that Automattic has a responsibility for improving the security of WordPress plugins since they are getting benefit from them.

If they are going to live up to that responsibility they have a lot of work to do, as can be seen in this case. After the vulnerability was disclosed in a plugin they are redistributing they don’t appear to have done anything about. As far as we can tell the vulnerability was only fixed after we reported the vulnerability to the people running the WordPress.org Plugin Directory (since we couldn’t find a direct contact for the developers of the plugin) and them pulling the plugin pending a fix. While the plugin was gone from the Plugin Directory it was still listed on the WordPress.com VIP website, though we don’t know if they continued to distribute it. It doesn’t even look as if people using WordPress.com VIP would know that the plugin had a vulnerability fixed since the changelog makes no mention of the new version, 1.9.3, or the security fix in it (which unfortunately is an all to common problem when plugins receive security fixes).

WPScan and Sucuri Put WordPress Websites at Risk

Yesterday we discussed a situation where the WPScan project didn’t bother to notify the developer of a WordPress plugin or the wordpress.org Plugin Directory about a vulnerability that they knew about. Some might excuse WPScan’s responsibility to alert them based on the fact that the vulnerability was discovered by someone else and already publicly disclosed. After running in to that situation we took a closer look at the WPScan project and found something more troubling. Back in March they started discussing a backup plugin that wasn’t properly securing backup files made by it. The issue was quite serious since some of the backup files, which can contain sensitive information, made by the plugin could be easily found with just a simple Google search. In the thread no one even brings up the idea of notifying the developer of the plugin or the Plugin Directory about the issue, which would be the way to get it fixed. Instead there is some discussion in thread on how to further exploit the poor security of the plugin in the WPScan vulnerability scanner.

We are quite sure that no one ever bothered to contact the Plugin Directory about the issue because within hours of us notifying them last week the plugin was pulled from the directory pending the security being improved. Within a few days of that, security improvements were introduced to the plugin. Based on the plugin developer’s comment at the end of the thread it doesn’t sound like WPScan had informed them either.

What makes this particular troubling is that at the same time they are at least knowingly leaving websites insecure they are selling WordPress security services.

They are not the only ones selling security services involved in this. Prominently displayed on the WPScan homepage is a banner letting you know the project is sponsored by Sucuri:

WPScan is Sponsored by Sucuri

We would ask why a security company would sponsor a project that seems more interested in exploiting security issues than fixing them, but we already know that Sucuri doesn’t have much interested in websites actually being secure. We have often been hired to re-clean websites that had previously cleaned by Sucuri. What we have found in those cases is that Sucuri didn’t do basic parts of a proper cleanup, including making sure the software on the website was up to date and determining how the website was hacked, which if done would have made it less likely that the website would be hacked again.