I mapped every WordPress plugin CVE since 2023. Here's what the data says — and how I built it.

Most "is this plugin safe?" advice is vibes. I wanted numbers, so I built a dataset. Here's what it found, and exactly how, so you can check my work or build your own. The finding first Of 8,010 WordPress plugins with a publicly documented vulnerability since 2023 (15,534 vulnerability records in total): 3,780 have been removed from the wordpress.org plugin directory. Removal stops updates but doesn't uninstall — affected sites keep running the code. 277 carried a critical (CVSS ≥ 9.0) flaw on record before removal. 2,115 are still installable today with a known vuln and no update in 12+ months — roughly 6.7M active installs combined. The part that surprised me most: "removed from the directory" is nearly invisible to a site owner. No dashboard warning, no email. The plugin just quietly stops getting fixes while sitting on the site. How I built it (no paid APIs) The whole thing runs on two public sources and no API keys. 1. Vulnerability data — the GitHub Advisory Database. It mirrors CVE records including the Patchstack and Wordfence CNA assignments that cover almost all WordPress plugin CVEs. It's a git repo, so a shallow, sparse clone of the advisories/unreviewed/{year} folders gets you the raw JSON: git clone --depth 1 --filter = blob:none --sparse \ https://github.com/github/advisory-database.git Each advisory carries the CVE ID, a CVSS vector string, CWE IDs, and reference URLs. The plugin slug isn't a first-class field — you recover it from the Patchstack/Wordfence reference URLs with a couple of regexes. That alone attributes the large majority of WordPress advisories to a specific plugin. 2. Maintenance signals — the wordpress.org plugin API. For each slug: https://api.wordpress.org/plugins/info/1.2/?action=plugin_information&request[slug]=SLUG That gives install count, last-updated date, tested-up-to version, and support-thread resolution ratio. A 404 (or an {error} body) means the plugin isn't in the directory — but that's ambiguous: it could be removed ,