Free Wordpress themes coming with a price

http://wpmu.org/why-you-should-never-search-for-free-wordpress-themes-in-google-or-anywhere-else/

by fwdbureau • 16 years ago

285 141 16 years ago

noodle3• 16 years ago

interesting to note that these are also some generally ugly themes.

nbpoole11• 16 years ago

It would be interesting to analyze whether the code was actually malicious (or could be used for malicious things) or spammy but benign.

jacques_chester19• 16 years ago

Despite what my degree says, I'm a horrible computer scientist. But would this be a bit like solving the halting problem? squint

nbpoole11• 16 years ago

I didn't mean a fully automated analysis (although it's possible to somewhat automate the de-obfuscation: see http://php-security.org/2010/05/13/article-decoding-a-user-s...). But given a bit of time, it should be possible to "unwrap" the obfuscated code in more detail and see what it's actually doing (which wasn't done in all cases).

iamdave2• 16 years ago

Interesting point, actually.

I'd like to see that same analysis now that you've brought it up just for the sake of pure curiosity. WP powers a good chunk of the blogosphere (including The New York Times website) out there now, and this kind of data could get some very good discussion going.

jacques_chester19• 16 years ago

> Though it can be argued that it's possible in some cases it's both; in the case of Gawker, perhaps there was a theme add-on that possible opened or exacerbated a hole resulting in the password leak.

Gawker run a custom platform, not Wordpress.

beoba2• 16 years ago

I think the fact that the authors were using base64 encoding to hide it answers your question.

nbpoole11• 16 years ago

No, it doesn't.

Is it shady? Yes. Would I want it running on my server? Absolutely not. Is the code running a backdoor that lets the attackers execute shell commands? We don't know.

Obfuscation like this could be used for any number of things. Themes sometimes have credits at the bottom (i.e., "This theme created by John Smith"): the obfuscation could be an attempt to keep people from finding/removing the credit. It can also be used to include shady backlinks to other sites. And as I mentioned before, it could be used to allow arbitrary code execution. It's all a matter of degrees, and it DOES matter which it is: one is dangerous and the others are just shady.

ceejayoz5• 16 years ago

Being spammy can be malicious. The black hat SEO folks know full well that these sorts of spammy links can lead to innocent folks' WordPress blogs getting eventually penalized or blacklisted from search engine indexing.

jacques_chester19• 16 years ago

The major price is that you had to install Wordpress. Now you're stuck with massaging that fat, slow sucker into shape.

I predict that Matt Mullenweg will be here within minutes to be all cheerful and helpful. Hello Matt!

edit: I realise it's a snide remark, but I've been running Wordpress sites since 2005 and I have an excellent storehouse of corrosive hatred built up at this point.

RBr2• 16 years ago

Wordpress themes aren't the only ones guilty of this. Shady plugins also contain hidden code.

http://www.themelab.com/2009/12/08/stop-downloading-wordpres...

TAC (Theme Authenticity Checker) isn't a bad place to start searching for malicious code: http://builtbackwards.com/projects/tac/

However, the only real solution to this problem is to run a limited set of extremely trustworthy plugins and build your own themes.

shadowpwner3• 16 years ago

> However, the only real solution to this problem is to run a limited set of extremely trustworthy plugins and build your own themes.

What on earth? It's pretty simple to check for malicious Javascript or PHP code in a theme.

jarek3• 16 years ago

What is your exhaustive definition of "malicious" in this case?

kaerast4• 16 years ago

It is fairly simple to check for obviously malicious JS or PHP code in a theme, but it's not so easy to find themes which are badly written and thus insecure. Can you always spot a XSS or SQL injection vulnerability?

RBr2• 16 years ago

I wonder how many people who run WordPress think it's pretty simple to check for malicious Javascript or PHP code in a theme?

jacques_chester19• 16 years ago

Wordpress isn't responsible; the faults are due to the design of PHP. The availability of the eval() and base64_encode() make these sorts of attacks basically unpreventable in untrusted sources.

ptomato2• 16 years ago

And not including eval and base64_encode would be ridiculous. No programming language is at all difficult to do nasty things with if you decide it's a good idea to include random untrusted code snippets.

jacques_chester19• 16 years ago

Sandboxing would be helpful. Java-like or Lua-like.

noodle3• 16 years ago

there are equivalents to eval and base64_decode in most languages (javascript, perl, python, ruby, etc). its not particularly the language's fault, either.

jacques_chester19• 16 years ago

There are, but in retrospect these features might be worth removing from a web-specific language, along with shell-out capability.

edit: why the downvotes? Are these functions truly indispensable for this particular domain?

pak2• 16 years ago

OK, I would like you to introduce me to a programming language where installing source code downloaded from an untrusted website on the internet does not come with security caveats. Care to do so?

jacques_chester19• 16 years ago

Sure. The JVM was engineered to include sandboxing for unsafe functions (disk access, for example). Lua allows quite granular sandboxing (look at what WoW takes away).

viraptor2• 16 years ago

Those themes just print out links to other sites. If you disallowed them to run any code, printing information out would be just as easy to hide:

    <script>......</script>

Nothing to do with the theme execution and still allows hiding code both via any encoding and via eval.

jacques_chester19• 16 years ago

I don't follow. Could you rephrase your argument?

pharrington• 16 years ago

This has nothing to do with PHP. Ton's of other languages have eval. Base64 is not the only way to obfuscate code. Even sandboxing addresses a -completely- different problem then this; this issue is that you're running arbitrary code from an untrusted source in the guise of your app.

jacques_chester19• 16 years ago

Hmm, I think you've put the point well. Nevertheless, I think the concept of shrinking the allowed functions (sandboxing) is part of the mix.

dholowiski• 16 years ago

Hasn't this been on HN already?

Anyway, just stick to wordpress.org/extend/themes - those themes are all under the scrutiny of the community and there's a group of peoe who are ramping up to do code reviews on them.

myth_drannon• 16 years ago

Not only the free themes but I see many pirated commercial packages on torrent websites. It's very tempting to download all these 50 woothemes, even just to try them out ... but the fear of hidden code just too strong.

apowell• 16 years ago

While your fear of hidden code is probably well-founded, I don't think it's piracy to redistribute the WooThemes. They have been released under the GPL. (http://www.woothemes.com/2009/06/woothemes-gpled/ and http://www.woothemes.com/terms-conditions/) For what it's worth, I've happily paid for the WooThemes I use.

ionfish2• 16 years ago

Not to mention that even if they haven't been explicitly released under the GPL, they are derivative code upon a GPL-licensed piece of software and thus GPLed themselves.

joshfraser• 16 years ago

The whole WP ecosystem is very insecure. For example, it's trivial to add a back door to a plugin that gives you full access to their server. Wordpress desperately needs to add a screening process. You can't assume everyone will do a code review before installing stuff even if they should.

mortenjorck• 16 years ago

The admin backend should simply search any newly-installed theme or plugin file for hard-coded URLs, and then display them to the user prior to activation. And throw a huge red flag if it encounters any base64 obfuscation.

kaerast4• 16 years ago

You mean like the exploit scanner as linked to from the source article? Make that part of core WordPress and scan for other obfuscation techniques too and you're well on the way to improving things.

henrikschroder3• 16 years ago

So what if malicious plugin writers then decide to encode urls like described in this story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2129745

How will you detect that with a scan?

jacquesm• 16 years ago

It wasn't 24 hours ago that there was a pretty hard-core obfuscation example of what you can do with a bit of javascript, I can't imagine that method would be easy to detect when extended to 'hard coded urls'.

You'd have to actually run the scripts embedded with real-life parameters in order to observe any malicious behavior.

in case you missed it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2129745

kaerast4• 16 years ago

The key here isn't a screening process for themes and plugins available through a WordPress website. The themes which have the back doors are typically pirated versions of paid-for themes which are never going to get into a WordPress app store. People are always going to pirate themes, people are always going to install themes from dodgy sources when they are free.

ams6110• 16 years ago

Anyone know if contributed code for other website platforms (Drupal, Joomla, DNN) etc. has similar issues? Is there any sort of "vetting" that goes on?

I actually worry more about the cheap but commercial modules, vs. the free/open source ones. With open source modules, chances are someone has perused the code looking for any signs of mischief. With the commercial code, often authored in another country, who knows?

jacques_chester19• 16 years ago

> Anyone know if contributed code for other website platforms (Drupal, Joomla, DNN) etc. has similar issues?

Absolutely. It's common to all these programs because they all use the LAMP architecture, which includes PHP (eval() and base64_encode()) and an inability to securely partition the data (can't have multiple users in the DB).

drdaeman2• 16 years ago

> which includes PHP (eval() and base64_encode())

At least Python, Ruby and Perl have those functions too. The problem is not related to PHP being able to eval(), it's:

1. Inadequate usage of PHP as template engine, where templates are coming from untrusted sources. Think of this as very extended case of non-sanitizing user input.

2. "Dancing bunnies"-type problem. A lot of users don't understand what they are doing. They are promised they would get a nice theme, so they install it.

> can't have multiple users in the DB

Wrong, it's perfectly possible. Unless you are stuck with some god-forsaken cheap crappy LAMP hosting.

Disclaimer: I don't like PHP at all, and I try to avoid it. Experts say, and I totally agree that there are a lot of various problems in LAMP ecosystem, but they lie in very different direction.

ceejayoz5• 16 years ago

> can't have multiple users in the DB

What?

PHP doesn't have a DB, and MySQL sure as hell allows multiple users.

lkrubner20• 16 years ago

Some of these problems are inherent to PHP, but the WordPress team has decided to work with PHP, therefore the problems of PHP are also legitimate issues to raise with the WordPress team. That is to say, in accepting PHP as their language, the WordPress team must take responsibility for that choice, and that includes confronting the security risks that arise from the choice of language.

Sam Ruby made this same point, and he said it much better than I can hope to (he is responding to Matt Mullenweg in the comments):

"Those that contribute to PHP apparently feel the most pain concerning support of multiple versions. Yes, you can argue that they brought this upon themselves; but it is worth noting that at this point you are along for the ride. When I’m in similar circumstances, I tend to consider the karma implications of cursing the driver. In any case, some people who are along for the ride with WordPress happened to cross my path yesterday. Perhaps you are in a position where you can help them. To my eyes, I see a bug that was reported on WordPress 2.1, and the milestone on that defect is currently set to 2.3. Hopefully the users affected won’t have a tendency to kick, or scream, or rant too much."

http://intertwingly.net/blog/2007/07/17/Popular-Sovereignty

There is another way to look at this. Microsoft has faced 30 years of criticism of its decision to promote features rather than security, a problem that began with DOS and lasted at least until Vista showed up.

That same type of criticism can and should be made against the WordPress team. They promote features to make the user experience pleasant, but their attitude towards security has been horrible.

What can they do? They can automate the test that Siobhan Ambrose does in the above article linked to by this thread. At the very least, WordPress can search a theme for Base64, so that when you try to activate the theme, you get a warning:

"These templates contain Base64, which may be masking malicious code. Do you wish to proceed?"

Again, it was the choice of the WordPress team to use PHP, so they must take responsibility for the choice of language. As Sam Ruby said, "It is worth noting that at this point you are along for the ride. When I’m in similar circumstances, I tend to consider the karma implications of cursing the driver"

More so, WordPress became popular because it was easy for designers to work with, and the WordPress team has certainly participated, and encouraged, the creation of a culture in which the promiscuous sharing of templates seems normal.

It is irresponsible of the WordPress team to ignore the security issues that this raises.

jacques_chester19• 16 years ago

Wordpress grew out of b2, which was written in PHP. At the time LAMP was pretty much all there was. For the time their decisions were reasonable.

lkrubner20• 16 years ago

You write:

"Wordpress grew out of b2"

That is simply a less direct way of saying what I wrote:

"The WordPress team has decided to work with PHP"

You phrase things in a passive voice so it seems as if no human made a conscious decision to work with PHP. In fact, the history of WordPress, like the history of any software project, is the history of active humans making conscious decisions.

You also write:

"At the time LAMP was pretty much all there was"

I'm not sure what you mean by that. At that time, a loud chorus of people were praising Zope, written in Python. Microsoft had ASP. The most popular blog platform, at that time, was MoveableType, written in Perl. There was a ton of free software available in Perl. And there was a whole of lot of projects happening in the world of Java. There were many choices. You seem to be re-writing history to make it sound as if the WordPress team had no choice but to use PHP.

Anyway, even if you were right, would that lessen their responsibility for creating software that is serious about security?

nbpoole11• 16 years ago

These problems are not inherent to PHP. As other people have pointed out, this is what happens when you run arbitrary code on your server. Even if you took away the base64 encoding and eval calls, people could still embed spammy links into the page.

lkrubner20• 16 years ago

That is exactly why WordPress needs to get serious about security. It's current attitude has been extremely slack. Their focus has been on releasing features that allow for a more pleasant user experience, rather than releasing features that enhance security. Above I compare the attitude of Microsoft to the attitude of Automattic. Justifiable criticism was aimed at Microsoft for promoting fun new user abilities, rather than security, in both DOS and Windows, for a long time. The same kind of criticism can be aimed at Automattic.

What can they do? At the very least, they can automate the test that Siobhan Ambrose does in the above article linked to by this thread.

drdaeman2• 16 years ago

Those problems are not inherent to PHP (directly), but to WP not using any sort of (intentionally capability-limited) templating system. A design flaw - because probably WP devs never considered templates would be provided by untrusted sources.

The (painful) solution is to throw away current templating approach, and use some template engine instead. A bit less painful solution would be a compiler from some restricted language to current PHP-based templates, and declaring current approach deprecated, warning users of problems and highly discouraging them from using any untrusted PHP code.

ionfish2• 16 years ago

I don't think you can blame the templating system when the plugin system is vulnerable to precisely the same issues, namely arbitrary code execution—except, of course, that the attack profile is so much broader for plugins since people will only have one template running (or two if they're using a child theme), but typically, many plugins.

ceejayoz5• 16 years ago

The issue - obfuscated code in third-party templates - is hardly inherent in PHP. The same technique can be used in any other popular web language.

For example: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/Base64.html

halostatue2• 16 years ago

Rails looks for files in specific locations to execute code, not arbitrary encoded strings.

Yes, it's possible to do, but much harder than eval'ing a string in the resource file.

cosgroveb2• 16 years ago

I am about as big (read: little) of a fan of PHP as the next guy but how in the hell are these problems inherent to PHP? If I were to run COBOL code from untrusted sources on my server you can forget about security.

lkrubner20• 16 years ago

Why does WordPress allow people to run untrusted code?

You write:

"If I were to run COBOL code from untrusted sources on my server you can forget about security."

That is why there should be a warning about untrusted code. Are you trying to let WordPress off the hook? Their attitude toward security has been horrible and they should be called out on it. I quote myself:

"These templates contain Base64, which may be masking malicious code. Do you wish to proceed?"

It doesn't matter if WordPress is written in PHP or COBOL, the team developing the software should make some attempt to address its many security flaws.

Please consider the odd use of the word "disrespectful" in this paragraph:

"It seems fundamentally disrespectful to users who are simply caught in the crossfire of a political power move their neither know or care about. PHP core has never shown any particular regard for its biggest apps, as evidenced by the above bug and others, so I’m not sure why we should go out of our way to promote their upgrade. PHP 6 sounds much more compelling."

http://ma.tt/2007/07/on-php/#comment-422760

That is Matt Mullenweg. Please note that his statement can be turned on its head. I could write:

"It seems fundamentally disrespectful to users to create software for them that has lots of fun features but no security."

lkrubner20• 16 years ago

Different programming environments enforce security to different degrees, with different defaults. I'll here post some of the many criticisms that have been aimed at PHP over the years:

Andrew van der Stock writes:

--------------

For some time, I’ve been worried about the direction of PHP. As many of you know, I helped write XMB Forum and now help write UltimaBB. XMB in particular is an old code base, and UltimaBB, a descendant from XMB. I’ve done a lot to protect that code base from attack, and luckily, we’ve been missed despite some doozy and silly security issues. After writing PHP forum software for three years now, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is basically impossible for normal programmers to write secure PHP code. It takes far too much effort.

PHP needs a proper security architecture, and support for newbie programmers. PHP’s raison d’etre is that it is simple to pick up and make it do something useful. There needs to be a major push by the PHP Development team to take this advantage, and make it safe for the likely level of programmers – newbies. Newbies have zero chance of writing secure software unless their language is safe.

Think about Logo for a minute. Logo can do some interesting things, but it is not a commercially useful language because it cannot do much. But it is an excellent teaching language. PHP is like Logo – it’s a simple and easy way to get into serious web development. It is possible to write large applications in PHP, so it is useful at that level. But it is inherently unsafe as it can do far, far more than Logo.

There are so many ways to break PHP that it is impossible for even experienced security professionals like me to code in it securely all the time. There are nearly 4000 function calls, and many of them have unintended consequences or have been inappropriately extended by something else.

http://www.greebo.net/2006/01/04/php-insecurity-failure-of-l...

---------------

Tim Bray put together a collection of links regarding criticism of PHP:

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/02/17/PHP

On that page, there is this from Dominic Mitchell:

"I’m in 100% agreement with you about the whole PHP thing. Every time I’ve looked at PHP, I’ve been unable to find out how they use placeholders in code that talks to the database. Yes, every database adaptor provides a quote function, but nobody uses it (consistently). And people wonder why PHP code is always full of security holes. It’s a real shame, as I can see that there’s a lot to like in PHP. But it really needs to clean its act up to appeal to people coming from other programming languages, instead of just people coming from dreamweaver. I actually heard David Heinemeier Hansson (sp?) talking about rails the other day. One of the key points he made is that it should be easy to do the right thing. That’s why Rails hits a sweet spot for me. But when you look at PHP, yes, it’s easy to code, but it’s not easy to do the right thing. That’s where it falls down."

The point that Hansson makes about Ruby is worth thinking about in the context of PHP security. Does PHP make it easy to write secure code? Does it help programmers do the right thing? The defaults in PHP, and the underlying assumptions of PHP, all tend in what direction?

Of those links, Jonas Maurus's post is also well worth reading:

http://maurus.net/resources/programming-languages/php/

Aristotle Pagaltzis sums up the underlying problem:

"All of these flaws are interconnected; the morass is simply the result of the language being a templating system that grew too big for its breeches. I don’t believe the problems can be corrected in any sensible fashion; PHP will always be a templating system, however much it may be straining against its clothes. And let me tell you, it’s still a great templating system! If all you need is to write a web app that consists of two pages, running four queries over a five-table database, there is nothing that will get you up and running faster."

http://plasmasturm.org/log/393/

BoppreH• 16 years ago

Can't base64 be used to encode small images, like icons? I'm sure that I've seen this in desktop apps. Why didn't the author decode them all, instead of just the last ones?

Also, did the tone of the article bother anyone else? It made me cringe after every few phrases.

duskwuff• 16 years ago

> Can't base64 be used to encode small images, like icons?

Yes, but if the "base64_decode" function is being used in the PHP code for the theme, chances are that it's being used to hide something.

infinity4• 16 years ago

I disagree that these problems are inherent to PHP. If the themes were written in almost any other language, people would still download themes or plug-ins and put it on their webspace. Many of the WordPress users are not experienced in coding for the web and some are not aware of the potential dangers that come with scripts from a shady source. They only get interested in security when their sites get owned. In the first place they just want to blog.

There are similar problems with widgets that people like to install in a sidebar or footer, like counters, clocks, ... There have been several cases where the widgets used a JavaScript hosted on a different domain, and later the JavaScript was changed to something that redirected visitors to infected sites. Here no PHP or any other server side language is involved. This problem is older than WordPress.

JoachimSchipper• 16 years ago

Sorry, but who's talking about PHP here?

telemachos• 16 years ago

I think he meant to reply to lkbruner[1] but "missed":

> Some of these problems are inherent to PHP

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131095

infinity4• 16 years ago

When the discussion started there were some remarks like this:

>Some of these problems are inherent to PHP

Also the availability of eval() and base64 encoding and decoding functions in PHP were blamed for the problems. You can find these statements if you read through the whole thread.

zx76• 16 years ago

This is just one of the reasons I recommend Jekyll - a static HTML blog generator. It's an excellent piece of software written by Tom Preston-Werner you can read about here: http://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/wiki

Better performance + security and you can use Textile!

brianwillis• 16 years ago

Thanks to your comment I've lost four hours of my life to fiddling with Jekyll. Thanks for making my Sunday night more interesting.

jrockway• 16 years ago

Ironically, most of the base64 "encrypted" code is easier to read than the Wordpress core...

wildmXranat• 16 years ago

I stopped hosting my personal rant blog and went with wordpress.com free hosting. I have given up trying to patch, update, comb through every plugin, theme, whatever. Having said that, I don't care if the hosted wordpress blog gets hacked. Losing some written word is something I can live with as long as the server isn't mine.

I have entered a period in my life where I only trust static code. I write all content in a meta markup language, I run a static page compiler on the directory structure and upload the created html and resources to the server.

bobds2• 16 years ago

STEP 1:

Make every theme/plugin author create a private key to sign their releases. Their public key will be available on their profile page and via API. Wordpress will notify you if the public key for an author has changed or if a release signature doesn't match the public key.

Why is this not done?

(Also in other software that uses plugins and is updated easily over the internet.)

kaerast4• 16 years ago

That's largely not going to make a difference. You can already mostly trust themes and plugins listed on the WordPress.org website. The themes with the bad code are the ones available elsewhere, and quite often are pirated versions of commercially available themes.

bobds2• 16 years ago

I shiver when I think how many pieces of code are fetched over the internet on my machines.

If you are a motivated attacker you can compromise a plugin author's PC or server and silently push a backdoor to a whole lot of people.

Signed releases are commonplace. It would make sense to require them in most plugin systems, especially those with central plugin repositories and lots of users.

w1ntermute• 16 years ago

Isn't this primarily Google's fault? Their algorithms should be capable of weeding out the bad sites.

patio112• 16 years ago

Reminder: if you're typing "sudo gem install ..." or the equivalent in your language of choice, you could be installing Wordpress.

OSS doesn't mean somebody else audited it for you.

burgerbrain• 16 years ago

Huh? Wordpress is just fine (well, fine enough..), it's the themes from shady 3rd party websites that are the issue being talked about here.

patio112• 16 years ago

Wordpress is not fine, because it encourages installing untrusted code. I am making the fairly consequential point that Wordpress is hardly alone in this, and that doing so allows the attacker to do anything they want. Shady 3rd party websites are hardly the only thing you have to worry about: how hard do you think it would be to use a modestly popular Ruby gem or Rails plugin to inject links? I think the answer is "Absolutely trivial."

rick888• 16 years ago

I found some of the offending code when I downloaded a free theme the other night.

It took me around 5 minutes to:

1) open footer.php 2) echo base64_decode('code') 3) take out all of the links and paste the rest of the code in the footer.

Problem solved.

A1kmm• 16 years ago

Creating advertising supported themes is a legitimate business model, and trying to stop someone removing the advertising by obfuscating code isn't really any worse than, say, distributing binaries to software which have been compiled to make it harder to change the source code.

I personally don't like to use software projects which aren't Free / Open Source (meaning that the full, unobfuscated source code is available and you are free to do what you like with it) - but I think it would be a stretch to say that distributing binaries or obfuscated code is automatically shady. You have to trust the person that makes the site, but asking someone to trust you is not synonymous with shady unless you then violate that trust.

Of course, if the sites are plagiarising other people's work without a license, including malicious code, or misleading people about what the code does or doesn't do, then there is a legitimate concern.

codelust• 16 years ago

Consider this the iOS versus Android equivalent on the web. You can either take the app store approach to themes and plugins and police every bit of code uploaded to codex or it can be the Andoriod model where there is no proactive policing.

Somehow, I don't think the Wordpress app store is going to make much progress at Automattic. It will require them to put in considerable resources to policing the code than improving the core.

The other way is to have a the Wordpress core bootstrap allow only a whitelist of functions to be called, which would have the effect to severly curtailing the flexibility that is required by plugin/theme developers.

Mind you, these problems are there not just with PHP/Wordpress. You can have the same issues with Chrome/Firefox extensions, bookmarkelets and most of the add-on models where you are running code that has not been subject of a decent audit.

The trouble for Wordpress/PHP is the footprint they have on the web now, which makes them pre-Vista/7 days for Microsoft on the web. You could probably do similar nasty things with a fancy jQuery plugin, but it is much better bang for the for the buck for the evil guy to have a go at something that is so widely installed and used by a large number of people who would not know it even if you were to show them code that does nasty things.

On other hand, a certified/curated theme/plugin/app store for all ecosystems that follow the reactive model to policing add-ons is a great idea for a start-up. I have been amused that nobody's done it so far. I know there are directories, but they don't test/audit the apps. Someone should give it a shot.

ck2• 16 years ago

I noticed that a few months after I put up a list of themes for bbPress (WordPress's little sister for forums) someone started a website that copied them all for download (which is fine because they are GPL) but then inserted all sorts of malicious spam links and other code into them.

Despite my warnings to users and trying to get Google to put that site into their security blocklist (never happened) I can now search for and find hundreds of sites that have these spam links from using those bad copies.

photomatt2• 16 years ago

The WordPress team has thought a lot about this issue, and the most effective solution so far has been to have robust official sources of themes and plugins and educating people to get everything from WordPress.org. (It's the only source built-in to WP software.) It's our equivalent of airplane security's "tougher cabin doors and passenger's willingness to fight back."

An automated scanner in core might temporarily relieve some of the current techniques of spammers but it would be trivial to vary obfuscation to evade any automated check, and I worry more about the false sense of security they would provide. A built-in automated checker would not make it safe for you to Google around random sites and install their software to execute on your server.

On the plus side, we now have over 1,300 themes in our official repository and every single one of them has been verified by hand.

Free Wordpress themes coming with a price

Related Stories