{"id":3380,"date":"2017-04-14T16:51:16","date_gmt":"2017-04-14T22:51:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/?p=3380"},"modified":"2017-04-14T16:51:16","modified_gmt":"2017-04-14T22:51:16","slug":"the-obviousness-of-unnatural-reviews-for-a-wordpress-security-plugin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/2017\/04\/14\/the-obviousness-of-unnatural-reviews-for-a-wordpress-security-plugin\/","title":{"rendered":"The Obviousness of Unnatural Reviews for a WordPress Security Plugin"},"content":{"rendered":"

An important element of security is trust, seeing as most people are not going to have ability to independently verify what a security product or service is doing what it is claimed to do and instead have rely on the those behind it to be truthful. What we have seen in\u00a0our experience with the industry is that they don’t even really attempt to be honest with the public, instead correctly seeing that they can get away with misleading and outright lying\u00a0because the checks that should exist against that are not working.\u00a0The end result of this is current poor state of security.<\/p>\n

Over at the blog for our Plugin Vulnerabilities service today we looked at a security plugin that fails to actually do its most important function<\/a>. We also noted that most of the reviews for the plugin look like they came from people\u00a0that were connected to the plugin, which provided a distorted view of the plugin.<\/p>\n

That plugin certainly isn’t alone among WordPress security plugins having many reviews that don’t look to have come naturally. Another plugin we came across within the last few days pretty obviously has unnatural reviews. The plugin\u00a0WP Security Optimizer<\/a> has 4\u00a0reviews despite having less than 10 active installs:<\/p>\n

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That is well beyond even an extremely high number of reviews for the amount of active installs. By comparison our plugins have the following mix of reviews to installs:<\/p>\n