In reply to Steven Gliebe.

In June we started monitoring changes made to plugins in the directory to try to catch some serious vulnerabilities. Some of the checks we do are based off of previous instances of intentionally or possibly intentionally malicious code. So that could catch some future instances of it, but realistically it would very difficult to catch instances where the developer makes an effort to hide what they are doing, as was the case with what was done with this plugin, with that type of monitoring. It would great if other companies were doing that type of monitoring as well, as even without catching intentionally malicious code, there are plenty of vulnerabilities in plugins that could be caught through that, based on the vulnerabilities we have found so far.

We also monitor the support forum for indications of security issues in plugins, which could pick up some discussions that point to intentionally malicious code being in plugins, but with this situation it only alerted us to what was going on at the end. If someone is aware of a security situation with a plugin that isn't getting properly handled in the future, please lets us know.

We are not aware of any disallowed PHP or JS function and there doesn't appear to be any mention of that in the developer guidelines. If there are any that are disallowed that have security implications, please let us know and we can start monitoring for usage of them.