Today we’re delighted to announce a new partnership between Shield Security and Patchstack, in an effort to further our common goal of building a more secure WordPress ecosystem.

This partnership is primarily, for now, in the form of our sponsorship of the Patchstack Red Team – a dedicated team of community researchers with the primary goal of eliminating security vulnerabilities in our most common WordPress addons – such as plugins and themes.

By offering a prize pool, the project strives to maintain strong motivation among the researchers and ultimately lead to more discoveries of possible vulnerabilities, in the software that runs our WordPress sites.

But the best part of this project, from our perspective, is the commitment on the part of Patchstack to ensure that these vulnerabilities are publicly available to the whole of the WordPress community.

WordPress is an inherently open(source) platform and we feel strongly that certain types of information, such as that for vulnerabilities data, should always be freely available to anyone that needs it, whenver they need it.

There are, of course, costs associated with such research and discovery, and we believe everyone should be rewarded for their work and effort. Our decision to sponsor the Patchstack Red Team is motivated by this belief – that if the researchers are going to get to work on behalf of the community, then we should definitely contribute to ensure they are rewarded.

What It Means For ShieldPRO

At the time of writing, ShieldPRO makes use of a different source for WordPress vulnerabilities in its scanner, but lately we’ve encountered a few issues and our plan is (Q4 2021/Q1 2022) to move towards the data supplied by Patchstack to power this feature.

Our expectation is that the approach taken by this new research team will actually result in faster data made available for our ShieldPRO customers and even more discoveries.

This can only be a good thing. Ensuring the software running our WordPress sites and WordPress-based businesses is more secure will naturally reduce stress and anxiety throughout the entire community.

As always, if you have any questions about anything in this article, or would like to leave us a comment, please feel free to do so below.