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Comment by Helithumper | Hacker News Reader

Timeline:

2021-09-22: Jetpack Scan team discovers the dropper and back door in the FotoGraphy theme, and tries to contact vendor about the initial finding.

2021-09-27: Confirm presence of dropper + back door in all current free plugins and themes downloaded from vendors website.

2021-09-28: Confirm that dropper + back door is not present on downloads from wordpress.org

2021-09-29: Trying to contact vendor again, with updates on new findings.

2021-10-14: Escalated to WordPress plugins team to try to obtain contact with the vendor.

2021-10-15: Compromised extensions are removed from the vendor’s site.

2021-10-16: Response from vendor

2022-01-17: Most plugins have been upgraded to new versions, themes have been pulled from WordPress.org.

2022-01-18 Public disclosure

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That's really pathetic, to put it mildly. Three weeks between initial contact and removal of compromised themes. Four months until public disclosure.

Public disclosure by the people that found the backdoor. I couldn't find any disclosure about it by AccessPress themselves between 15. October when they pulled the compromised themes and plugins to now.

ThriveThemes still hasn't released a disclosure on an attack from March 2021.[0] This seems to be par for the course among theme developers.

0. https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2021/03/recently-patched-vuln...

I never download from anywhere but wordpress.org and a lot of others don't, and that wasn't attacked, so I disagree that it's "pathetic".

That's not the timeline. It was a single day from contact to removal of compromised plugins. According to the article, the issue was that the vendor's contact form didn't work, not that the vendor didn't quickly remove the plugins.

You are also confusing plugins with themes. They are not exactly the same.

> vendor's contact form didn't work

Had this happen recently to a site. The SMTP password was set wrong and I don't know how many months/years this form just failed to submit but no one was aware of it... was for a landing page type site.

> The attack was discovered by researchers at Jetpack, the creators of a security and optimization tool for WordPress sites.

It’s a deceitful way to present it. Jetpack and WordPress are the same company.

It's not deceitful at all. Anyone who's in the WP ecosystem understands this.

Jetpack is part of Automattic. Automattic's main thing is wordpress.com (the hosted platform). Automattic and WP.org are not the same thing even though ( as with many open source projects that have commercial implications) the lines are somewhat blurred.

Presenting this as "deceitful" is really quite the over-reaction.

If the lines are somewhat blurred, you can understand my initial confusion, not being “in the WP ecosystem” myself.

Sure. but perhaps think about the use of emotive words like "deceitful" when you don't fully understand what's going on?

English as third language, so let’s say I didn’t realise it was such a strong word.

English is a mess.

Deceitful implies intention. Qualifiers help. "Unintentionally misleading" fits better. It's like the difference between manslaughter (whoopsiedeath) and murder (intentional).

You have to understand that this sort of intentional obfuscation of ownership and responsibility under a single root of ownership is in most areas of business a pretty good indication of ill intent (even if it is depressingly common).

That’s simply not true. Jetpack is owned by Automattic. Automattic has an exclusive license to the name “WordPress” from the WordPress Foundation but WordPress is owned, operated, and managed by the WordPress Foundation and is a totally separate entity.

Source: I work at Automattic and used to work on a Jetpack team.

Thanks for the clarification, it's not that easy to understand when one looks at the Automattic website.

This is true, but it's also important to note that Matt Mullenweg founded/co-founded and leads both organizations.[0][1]

0. https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattm/

1. https://www.guidestar.org/profile/20-5498932

So isn't the reasonable deduction here that the vendor was responsible for this given it was present on their website but not on the plugins through Wordpress? They probably didn't have the back door on the wordpress plugins because those would face a higher scrutiny than the ones on their site. Finally they get caught and go silent, but then when wordpress knows they finally respond because they know the jig is up and are trying to save face.

I don't think that's a reasonable deduction, it seems like the contact form on the vendor's website didn't work. That could possibly be compromised by the attacker.

I think the more reasonable deduction is that the vendor's website was compromised, and that's where the attacker was able to introduce new files.

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