Thanks for the eye-opening article. I'm part of a security startup called Prevoty, and we're new to the WordPress community. We're really digging the discussion here. With so many third-party themes/plugin vulnerabilities and a constantly shifting ecosystem, we're prompted to look at creative ways to fill in the gaps.

Not long ago we released our SmartFilter WordPress plugin, which acts as a preview layer to sanitize all input and protect your site from code injections and cross-site scripting (XSS). Because it doesn't rely on past signatures, it's able to understand content in a more modern way and prevent zero-day exploits. We're then able to give precise analytics on how many rule breaks, violations and injections we handled for you. (You can even live test some of SmartFilter's functionality with blocks of dirty or malicious code on Prevoty's website.)

We're love to have some WordPress aficionados give SmartFilter a whirl and share valuable feedback. Check it out at wordpress.org/plugins/smartfilter. Please let us know what you think!