Transcript
[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, testing secure WordPress hosting, does the marketing match the reality?
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So on the podcast today we have Maciek Palmowski. Maciek is based in Poland and works at Patchstack, one of the companies in the WordPress ecosystem dedicated specifically to security. At Patchstack, Maciek collaborates with other security professionals on industry reports, bug bounty programmes, and solutions for agencies, product owners, and hosting companies aiming to secure their client sites.
I met up with Maciek at WordCamp Europe, and we discussed his presentation there. It examined the claims of secure hosting made by many WordPress hosting providers. He describes how Patchstack set out to test these claims with real world penetration testing, using 30 known plugin vulnerabilities across multiple hosts. Employing standardised methodologies and validating their results independently.
The findings are sobering. The majority of WordPress specific attacks still get through, and there’s a significant gap between the marketing hype and real protection.
The conversation starts with Maciek’s background, and how his journey in the WordPress security space led to a focus on the promises made by hosts.
From there, the discussion