What it does: Compares every core file, and every plugin hosted on wordpress.org, with the checksums wordpress.org publishes for that exact release — api.wordpress.org/core/checksums/1.0/ for core (MD5) and downloads.wordpress.org/plugin-checksums//.json for plugins (MD5 and SHA-256). Each file gets one of five verdicts. How to access: GuardForge > File integrity. Runs daily by cron and on demand. Free/PRO: Free, including the plugin and theme walk. The integrity_scope_extras setting decides the scope; there is no licence check anywhere in it. The five verdicts:

• official — the file matches the published hash.
• modified — it is in the published build and does not match.
• missing — the build has it and this site does not.
• unexpected — a file that is in no published build at all. This is the one a snapshot-to-snapshot comparison can never produce: a shell that was already on disk when the baseline was taken looks exactly like an unchanged file. Findings are sorted with unexpected first.
• unreferenced — nothing publishes hashes for it. Every theme, every premium or custom plugin, and any single-file plugin whose wordpress.org slug cannot be derived from its filename. These keep the scan-to-scan comparison and are never counted as clean.

Notes:

• A 404 from wordpress.org means “no reference”, never “clean”. Reading it as a pass would put a tick beside exactly the files an attacker is likeliest to be living in.
• Answers are cached per (slug, version): 30 days for a catalogue that exists, 3 days for one that does not — wordpress.org publishes a plugin’s sums slightly after the release, so on release day “not yet” and “never” are indistinguishable. A transport failure is not cached at all; otherwise one timeout would declare the whole of core unreferenced for a month.
• One scan makes at most ten requests. What it could not reach is queued for the next run and named on the screen, so a site with sixty plugins is covered over a few days rather than in one burst a cron tick cannot survive.
• The request carries the version, the locale and the slug — not the site address. Guard Forge deliberately keeps the site URL out of the user agent so that sentence can be written down.
• The hardening score’s integrity_baseline row stops reading “Done” while unexpected > 0.
• All of it goes through the shared Forge_Net SSRF gate, and class-staging-outbound-surface-test.php enumerates every way out of the free package so a new one cannot be added silently.