A week ago I found the now well known backdoor in BlogPress SEO. Since then the news has been picked up all over the place, some more accurate than others. Regardless, the pressure has caused the makers of the plugin to remove the backdoor, which did not move it out of its unacceptable state.
Visiting the website for BlogPress SEO yielded some interesting information this morning. Looks like our ‘friends’ over there uploaded a few graphs of the total number of blogs and total pages for the past 7 days. There were 40 users of the plugin before I found the backdoor in the plugin. On the next day the number of users rose to 65 or so blogs.
Then, Joost picked up on the story and wrote the empty version of the plugin and placed it in the WordPress.org repository. The next day the number of users dropped to 22. Monday and Tuesday saw the number of blogs drop to about 6. Sadly, on Wednesday, the number of installs rose to about 33 blogs again.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]