Episode 43: Wordfence Research on Malvertising Campaign Makes the News

This week, we chat about the plan for WordPress 5.3 and some of the new features we will see added to WordPress in November, including many improvements to the editor. We will also see a switch from robots.txt files to meta tags for better control over search engine indexing. We also cover the latest developments with our threat intelligence team’s research into an ongoing malvertising campaign targeting WordPress plugin vulnerabilities. This story received quite a bit of news coverage, and that coverage caused closed-source content management platform Wix to Tweet a cheeky dig at WordPress that fell flat.

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Some sources we reference in this week’s episode include:

• WordPress 5.3 development kicks off with release scheduled for November 12.
• WordPress 5.3 will change how it blocks indexing.
• Ongoing malvertising campaign exploiting new vulnerabilities.
• A Forbes article takes our research and makes it rather clickbait-y.
• A Wix tweet tried to get cheeky but falls flat.

You can find Mark on Twitter as @mmaunder and Kathy as @kathyzant.

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