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bhk | 7 months ago

What does this impact? 90% of sites on the internet? Just a couple of low-traffic sites?

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rectang|7 months ago

Somewhere in between.

Gravity Forms is a very popular premium WordPress plugin.

I maintain a handful of WordPress sites (wouldn't have been my choice of platform but whatever) and the design and functionality of Gravity Forms is better than most (aside from it being CPU-hungry). It doesn't generally give me trouble and as a developer I've been happy with how Rocket Genius have interacted with me when I've filed trouble tickets.

A pretty substantial number of small and mid-tier orgs have Gravity Forms installed. I don't know the numbers — the wordpress.org popularity stats mainly reflect installation of free plugins not premium — but there should be a lot of sites handling a lot of traffic.

EDIT: That's the number of sites which could have been affected. Fortunately only a small number of sites actually got the compromised package because it didn't enter the main automatic distribution chain.

dotancohen|7 months ago

I haven't done Wordpress since before 5.0 (Gutenberg), but even then (2017) Gravity Forms was used on almost every site.

chuckreynolds|7 months ago

seemingly small amount of sites that manually downloaded that version from the site as opposed to 'most' that get premium(paid) update files through their API gateway (that I think calls file from AWS).

> The Gravity API service that handles licensing, automatic updates, and the installation of add-ons initiated from within the Gravity Forms plugin was never compromised. All package updates managed through that service are unaffected.

Dazzler5648|7 months ago

"The infection does not seem to be widespread, which could mean that the backdoored plugin was only available for a very short period of time and only delivered to a small number of users."