In this episode, Marcus Couch and I discuss the news making headlines including, WordCamp Miami in its 9th year, OSTraining partnering with GoDaddy to release training videos, and why plugins sometimes disappear from the WordPress plugin directory. We also provide an update on the REST API vulnerability that is actively being exploited to deface webpages.…
Scott Arciszewski, Chief Development Officer for Paragon Initiative Enterprises, who is most widely known for his cryptography engineering work, published a post on Medium criticizing Matt Mullenweg, co-creator of the WordPress open-source software project, for not caring enough about security. Arciszewski has since retracted the post but you can read it via the Wayback Machine.…
Nearly 50K publicly available plugins call the WordPress plugin directory home but once in awhile a few of them seem to disappear. There is usually a good reason for why this happens but the only information available to the public is a page that says the plugin cannot be found. If the plugin is popular…
It has been nearly two weeks since the WordPress security team disclosed an unauthenticated privilege escalation vulnerability in a REST API endpoint in 4.7 and 4.7.1. The vulnerability was patched silently and disclosure was delayed for a week to give WordPress site owners a head start on updating to 4.7.2. Last week hundreds of thousands…
On this episode, Marcus Couch and I are joined by Morten Rand-Hendriksen to discuss his WordPress Telemetry proposal. We discuss the potential benefits of having an opt-in usage data collection system that could help core developers and others make informed decisions. Rand-Hendriksen also shares what he’s learned from teaching WordPress at Lynda.com, on how difficult…
WP Super Cache is a nearly 10-year-old plugin that is maintained by Donncha Ó Caoimh and is actively installed on more than a million sites. Releases have been far and few between, but Ó Caoimh has released WP Super Cache 1.4.9 that patches cross-site-scripting vulnerabilities on the settings page. “Those pages are only accessible by admin…
At the end of January, WordPress 4.7.2 was released to fix four security issues, three of which were disclosed at the time of the release. These included a SQL injection vulnerability in WP_Query, a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the posts list table, and the Press This feature allowing users without permission to assign taxonomy…
In this episode, Marcus Couch and I are joined by Cameron Barrett, founder of SchoolPresser, LLC. Barrett explains how he negotiated and helped migrate Newark New Jersey’s public school system from a proprietary CMS to WordPress. He shares the pitfalls he experienced and the amount of money the district is saving since making the switch.…
Aaron D. Campbell, WordPress Core Contributor at GoDaddy, is replacing Nikolay Bachiyski as WordPress’ Security Czar or WordPress Core Security Team Lead. The role was created in 2015 to provide more structure and focus around incident responses. “The responsibilities of the position include, organizing the security team and making sure all security concerns and reports…
WordPress 4.7.1 is available for download and fixes eight security issues that affect WordPress 4.7 and below. The PHPMailer library was updated to patch a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability. WordFence reported the vulnerability last month as critical and that it affects WordPress core. However, in the announcement post for 4.7.1, Aaron Campbell, WordPress’ new…
The BuddyPress development team has released BuddyPress 2.7.4 to address a security vulnerability that affects all versions back to 2.0. According to John James Jacoby, lead developer of BuddyPress, “This version patches a vulnerability to the BuddyPress core attachments API that could allow arbitrary file deletion on certain installation configurations.” The vulnerability was responsibly disclosed by…
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I are joined by Tony Perez, co-founder and CEO of Sucuri. It’s easy to tell from this episode that Perez is extremely passionate about web security. We discussed a wide range of topics related to security including, trends involving WordPress, the FUD factor, messaging surrounding HTTPS,…
Over the weekend, the WP eCommerce team released version 3.11.4 of its e-commerce plugin. The update patches an SQL injection vulnerability that was responsibly disclosed by Mika Epstein, a member of the WordPress.org plugin review team. According to Justin Sainton, lead developer of WP eCommerce, the team was notified of the vulnerability on November 11th and patched within…
WP Media is reporting a high risk XSS vulnerability in W3 Total Cache that the company learned about from El Rincón de Zerial’s security blog. The plugin is currently active on more than one million WordPress sites. This particular vulnerability is found within the plugin’s support form that is embedded in the admin, according to…
When ManageWP allowed users to perform security scans of websites through the Orion interface in December of 2015, a feature commonly requested by customers was the ability to automate the scans. Nine months after implementing security checks for customers, ManageWP has added automated security scans to its assortment of features. The automated security scans are a premium feature…