The current market has over 52,000 plugins. There are plugins which are fully free to use and there are plugins which are commercially available as well in the form of third party companies and developers. This article is about the plugins which are pirated copies of the legitimate versions, also known as nulled plugins. 

What are nulled plugins?

Nulled plugins are pirated versions of legitimate or premium plugins. Needless to say they are very malicious and may cause harm to the users devices. Because, nulled plugins are premium WordPress plugins that may have been a victim of hacking.  Also it may contain modified code designed to cause harm or collect information from the users devices.

Nulled plugins are mainly available at third-party websites for free or a minimum cost. This doesn’t provide any money to the creators of the plugins, it benefits only the pirates.

“Basically, if a premium plugin that you get from a website/owner that is not the authorized developer of that plugin or an affiliate seller is considered null.”

Why should nulled plugins be avoided?

1. Risk of getting hacked: Malicious/Fake plugins are not a good idea to use. You have no idea what else is lurking in the code if you download an plugin or extension from anywhere other than the developer. The moment someone installs a fake plugin there is risk of the site getting hacked. It’s much safer to presume that if you didn’t get it from the original creator, it may have been tampered with, include unsafe code, or even be infected with a virus.

2. Data leak: When you install a nulled WordPress plugin or theme, you put your customers’ sensitive data, such as usernames, passwords, and personal profile information, at risk. Gaining and maintaining client trust in your brand is the foundation of a successful business. If you breach your clients’ personal information, you risk losing their faith in your site.

3. Technical support: Nulled extensions can provide all of the capabilities of a premium plugin or theme, but they can never provide all of the benefits that a paying user receives. That’s because a large portion of what you pay for with licensed software is developer support. When you pay for a product, you receive the ability to contact the developer directly if you have any problems with it.

4. Automation of updates: A license key is required in order to allow automatic updates for a premium plugin or theme. You’ll have to manually update extensions every time there’s a new update if you don’t have a valid license key. You go from having to simply click a button, to having to delete and re-upload a plugin every single time. More importantly, you’ll no longer get that red update notification in your WordPress dashboard. That means you’ll have to find another way to keep track of when new updates come out. Which is tiring and time consuming.

5. Support the developers: If you use a nulled plugin you’re robbing them of revenue that could be used to improve their plugins. In order to justify the work spent maintaining and upgrading their products, plugin developers require money. Increased use of nulled plugins would undoubtedly discourage hard-working developers who spend countless hours developing new inventive plugins to improve your life. Because developers work hard to create premium plugins in order to make enough money to live comfortably.

6. Malware Distribution: Because wordpress plugins typically cost money to use or install, hackers provide “free” to download versions that are nulled or cracked. Although not all software that has been cracked or nulled contains backdoors concealed inside the code, attackers frequently view this as a great chance to spread their malware. The use of these components has several major security repercussions, and they may not be discovered until it is too late.

How Onsist takes down software piracy?

Software Piracy is still undeniably a threat to software producing brands and businesses. Video, Audio and Photo editing software are among popular software programs ripped. Our trained analysts can help your organization maximize revenue by taking down infringing copies.

Find Infringements

Find pirated content in three ways

• Monitoring Engines

Anti-Piracy Software that will crawl the web for infringements 24/7

• Piracy Database

A database of scraped piracy sites for easy content detection

• Trained Experts

Experts to manually reach places a bot cannot

Remove Them

Report and remove content when it’s found

• Send Out Notices

Illegal content is reported to the infringing sites

• Contact hosting

Hosting providers will be notified of infringements

• Clean up search engines

Google, Bing, and other search engines will be cleaned

Report The Results

Get notified of findings and removals

• Live Statistics

Get live feedback on found and reported infringements

• Detailed Results

Check out the status of each and every URL that’s found

• Weekly Reports

Receive weekly reports on what’s been found and removed