Plugin “calls home”

I have used it on a number of websites over a number of years for developing and found it useful.

Recently though I ran into something that concerns me.

One was a private website. It was on a subdomain of a public website. I had watched the traffic through the years. No one had “found” it. It wasn’t indexed or linked anywhere. It was only used by a small non-profit staff. I had some changes to make to it and used this plugin, when all of the sudden it was “found” by bots from all over the world. Not good bots either. Thank goodness for Wordfence.

I thought, “odd…” but it is just possible that it was just found randomly.

Then a month later I had to set up a new WordPress installation in a hidden directory for some development (completely different domain/server/company). I installed your plugin and within hours, the bots found it.

Two websites that should not have any traffic at all.

This plugin is calling “home” and doing goodness knows what with that information.

I won’t be using it again.

• This topic was modified 5 years, 7 months ago by sus.