Do you own or manage a WordPress Woocommerce based website? If so you should have received a notification of an immediate vulnerability requiring your action. Waste no time in updating your site as this vulnerability is listed as “critical”. Woocommerce has taken immediate action to address the issue and should be commended for their response time. Ensure you have updated to the latest release (5.5.1). Woocommerce hasn’t released any information as to whether or not any site’s data has been compromised stating their investigation is ongoing. They do state that if affected “… the exposed information will be specific to what that site is storing but could include order, customer, and administrative information.” They are reassuring in pointing out this is uncommon and WooCommerce is still safe to use.
If have not been notified you need to update your administrator email address and/or ensure the admin email address is added to your email whitelist. If you’ve built a site for someone it is worth your while to notify them of the need to update. All too often store managers are not necessarily technically inclined when it comes to keeping the inner workings up to date. Hat’s off to WooCommerce for the quick response.
In the event you are an online WooCommerce owner and are wondering where to turn for management of critical updates you can minimize your management costs merely by hosting with a quality hosting service. In using SiteGround hosting service all of the sites I manage were automatically updated. In addition to the WooCommerce notifications, SiteGround also notifies me of vulnerabilities and automatically applies patches as a part of their continuity of service as well. This is a shameless plug for SiteGround and WooCommerse as they have provided me with the highest level of customer and technical service for over 10 years. I have hosted with other service providers and used other shopping carts, in the long haul these two have my highest level of confidence and offered the highest level of flexibility with respectful savings.