Do you own a WordPress plugin hosted on WP plugin repository? You may receive an email with subject line as ‘ [WordPress.org Plugins] Urgent: Your Plugin Has Been Removed’. Be careful before responding to such emails as this may be a phishing attempt. Emails with such headline is circulating within the WordPress community users as they may treat such emails with most priority and get into the trap. First of all one should check the email address from where it came. If you don’t find the source email account with wordpress.org then DON’T respond to that email as it is nothing but a phishing attempt.
Recently few WordPress plugin authors started getting this type of email (One more user) with content as,
Dear WordPress Plugin Developer,
Unfortunately, a plugin you are hosting has been temporarily removed from the WordPress repository. We are going to manually review your plugin because it has been reported for violating our Terms of Service. If your plugin does not get approved then it will be permanently removed from the WordPress repository.
You can check if your plugin has been approved or rejected at
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/my-plugins-status/ [link]
The important thing is that these emails come from different email IDs like hotmail, yahoo etc. For example, above mentioned user got such email from wordpressplugin [at] hotmail.com. WordPress team use to communicate on plugin related topics with email ID as plugins [at] wordpress.org and we should note that at least the communication should come from an email account with wordpress.org at the end.
Why these phishing emails?
After sending this phishing email, actually someone wants to have your important data like user ID, password, credit card information etc. DO NOT ENTER YOUR PASSWORD or Any Other Information on the page opened through the link attached in the email.
This is very important for those who are having plugins hosted on WordPress as they may take the communication seriously and start following the instructions mentioned in this email.
Spread this information in your circle and let everyone know about this phishing attempt. If you are having an email address on self hosted domain, then you should have spam protection tools to avoid such emails.
Update – Today, one of my colleague also received this kind of email from a Gmail ID (wordpress[dot]plugins[dot]mail [at] gmail.com). The link attached in the email points to a bb-login.php page of wordpresss[dot]horizon-host[dot]com which is definitely NOT the official WordPress Repository site.