Friendly Weekend Reminder: Upgrade WordPress!
Friday, August 14th, 2009
As much as constant software updates are a pain, they’re essential in today’s digital world. If you have a blog on the web and unless you use WordPress.com, TypePad, Tumblr, Posterous or the like – odds are you might have the nagging “update me!” notice hanging around every couple of weeks or months.
Earlier this week, WordPress announced a new security release of their popular publishing software that plugged a pretty serious hole: one that would’ve allowed someone to gain administrator access pretty easily. While minor software updates usually sit on the bottom of to-do lists around the web, a few of the more prominent voices were targets of attacks trying to gain access before they upgraded their blogs.
Paul Stamatiou was saved by some extra security plug-ins he has in place (ed note: What were they?) while Robert Scoble’s blog was actually comprimised. Robert’s logic for not updating right away is fair but “1/8th” is a risk I’ll take to make sure all of my public publishing systems are secure.
So, if you have some downtime this weekend, take a look around your web and make sure everything is up-to-date. WordPress has automatic updating features and even if your server isn’t configured to handle that, the regular update process is easy as well. If you’re in the agency world, the same goes for any client projects you work on as well.
Photo credit: CarbonNYC
