WordPress powers over 40% of websites globally, making it by far the largest web hosting platform in the world. Recently, however, the company has been mired in controversy. An ongoing dispute between Automattic (WordPress’s parent company) and WP Engine (a prominent WordPress hosting provider) has now made its way to the courts, sending ripples through the WordPress community.
In September 2021, security researchers at Jetpack discovered two critical vulnerabilities in a previous version of the popular WordPress plugin WP Fastest Cache after performing an in-depth code audit. This plugin creates a static, HTML version of the WordPress user’s website, and was developed to help WordPress site owners improve their site’s security performance.
SiteLock research and remediation teams have become aware of several WordPress plugin vulnerabilities that are affecting our customers. The symptoms most commonly associated with these WordPress plugin vulnerabilities are malicious redirects. Essentially, visitors are being sent to another website than the one they are attempting to access. We are still gathering information on these vulnerabilities, and how they are being used. As soon as we have completed our review, we will release more information.
This week a severe WordPress vulnerability was patched by the authors of Easy WP SMTP WordPress Plugin. Easy WP SMTP allows users to send outgoing emails through the SMTP server in an attempt to keep their emails from going directly to spam or junk mail. This vulnerability allows cybercriminals to gain unauthenticated access to sites using this plugin. With over 300,000 active installations, thousands of users are affected by this zero-day vulnerability in version 1.3.9.
The Gutenberg WordPress Editor will very soon be part of WordPress core. This new editor promises a completely different content creation experience in WordPress, and is arguably one of the biggest changes of functionality in WordPress history. And no single core feature has ever inspired such heated debate amongst WordPress users and developers.
