> I was at WordCamp 2014 or 2015 where Matt was asked about improving security in WordPress and he literally laughed at the question. So, yeah...
The illusion that everyone's under assumes that WordPress Core is secure, and vulnerabilities are quickly patched and pushed out via the dot org update system.
Plugins are a whole different mess that people often exclude, but plugins are also what makes WordPress the success it is today.
Wordpress core is pretty secure. The problem is people who are using WP just install the core and then add in whatever plugins they need to get what they want to site to do. Nobody ever sandboxes and tests their plugins, they just install them willy-nilly - which is like taking candy from a baby if you're a hacker.
And its already happened last year:
Thousands of sites running the WordPress content management system have been hacked by a prolific threat actor that exploited a recently patched vulnerability in a widely used plugin.
The vulnerable plugin, known as tagDiv Composer, is a mandatory requirement for using two WordPress themes: Newspaper and Newsmag. The themes are available through the Theme Forest and Envato marketplaces and have more than 155,000 downloads.
Yeah that's a mistaken take to begin with. It also doesn't make a lot of sense to absolve WP Core of allowing plugins to cause chaos. If WP had a secure model for plugins then they could be far more limited in what they can do. But security was never a concern for Automattic.
The illusion that everyone's under assumes that WordPress Core is secure, and vulnerabilities are quickly patched and pushed out via the dot org update system.
Plugins are a whole different mess that people often exclude, but plugins are also what makes WordPress the success it is today.