Patchstack Reports 404 Vulnerabilities Affecting 1.6M+ Websites to WordPress.org Plugins Team
After an accumulation of undisclosed and unpatched vulnerabilities in plugins hosted on WordPress.org, Patchstack has reported 404 plugins to WordPress’ Plugin Review Team. “This situation creates a significant risk for the WordPress community, and we decided to take action,” Patchstack researcher Darius Sveikauskas said. “Since these developers have been unreachable, we sent the full list of those 404 vulnerabilities to the plugins review team for processing.” Ordinarily, reporting plugins to WordPress.org is a last resort for challenging cases after Patchstack fails to find a way to contact the vendors. In this case, many of these plugin authors have included zero contact information in their extensions or are not responding to communication attempts. Patchstack has characterized it as a “zombie plugins pandemic” due to the overwhelming number of abandoned plugins affecting more than 1.6 million sites. The WordPress.org Plugins Team has acted on the report by closing more than 70% of the plugins. In June, the team added six new sponsored volunteers and opened applications for more team members but have struggled with managing a formidable backlog of plugins waiting to be reviews. The backlog is climbing higher and is now over 1,119 plugins with a 71-day wait time. Adding plugin vulnerability issues, where…
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