Last week we mentioned that we had found that a WordPress plugin that had a security vulnerability in its current version, that had recently been attempted to be exploited, had remained in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory for six months after it was publicly disclosed. That plugin had received an advisory from Secunia and we have reviewed the rest of Secunia’s WordPress advisories to check for any other plugins in the directory that also had unresolved security vulnerabilities. We identified 24 more plugins that have vulnerabilities in their current versions and had remained in the Plugin Directory since the advisory was released. We have reported those plugins to WordPress and they have been removed from the Plugin Directory. If and when the vulnerabilities are fixed they should return to the directory.
You can check if your WordPress installation is running any plugins that have been removed from the Plugin Directory, whether for security issues or other issues, with our plugin No Longer in Directory. We have just updated it with the plugins that we reported to WordPress and have added links to Secunia Advisories for any of the plugins that have received them.
The oldest Secunia advisory for a plugin with an unresolved issue that had remained in the Plugin Directory was from January of 2008 and the most recent was from February of this year. The types of vulnerabilities in these plugins included cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (CSRF), SQL injections, and file inclusion. These plugins had over 560,000 combined downloads. The number of downloads that individual plugins had ranged from 300 to 93,000. Four of the plugins had over 50,000 downloads, which should be a reminder that just because a plugin is popular it doesn’t mean that it is more secure than less popular plugins.
We also found a situation where a plugin had been removed from the directory but a fork of the plugin has remained in the Plugin Directory despite also containing the vulnerability and two plugins that had their vulnerabilities fixed but the version number was not changed so that people that already had the plugin installed will remain vulnerable to being exploited. Resolution on those plugins’ issues from WordPress is still pending.
We plan to review other sources of claimed vulnerabilities to see if there are more plugins with publicly known vulnerabilities in their current versions that have remained in the Plugin Directory.