Unmasking Free Premium WordPress PluginsWordPress has a large repository of free plugins (currently 30,000+) that can add almost any functionality to your blog. However, there is still a market for premium plugins. Premium plugins are especially popular when they help blogs make money: eCommerce, SEO, affiliate and customer management, and so on.

Such plugins may be really great and well worth their price, but not many webmasters are ready to pay for plugins, especially when they can find “free” or “nulled” versions of the same plugins on the Internet. All they need to do is search Google for [<plugin-name> free download].

Getting something valuable for free may sound great, however, in most cases, you won’t get what you expect. After all, you should ask yourself the question, why would someone spend their time to steal software, and then post it to various sites and forums where they can’t even count on any advertising revenue? Usually, the answer is that they expect to take advantage of the sites that install the software they post. How? By adding some undisclosed functionality to the stolen plugins like backdoors, ads, hidden links, and SPAM.

In this post, we’ll talk about “patched” malicious premium plugins. We’ll talk about what they do, how they work, and about websites that build their businesses around stolen WordPress themes and plugins. Read original article here…