Security

WordPress security news and issues.

WordPress security release for all versions

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Brian Krogsgard
All past versions of WordPress "are affected by a critical cross-site scripting vulnerability, which could enable anonymous users to compromise a site," according to the release post by Gary Pendergast. WordPress 4.1.2, 4.2 RC3, and new tag releases on past versions…

What we learned today

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Brian Krogsgard
In my blog post about today's coordinated plugin update, I discussed the logistics of many of the top WordPress plugins working together to put out an update to fix the misuse of add_query_arg() and remove_query_arg(). Throughout the day, I've tracked other…

WordPress News with Brian Richards

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Brian Krogsgard
Brian Richards and I cover the week in WordPress news with a new short format (15 minute) podcast. The Excerpt is part of the Draft podcast, and will be balanced by long form interviews.

Understanding WordPress security vulnerabilities

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Brian Krogsgard
Daniel Cid has a good post on Sucuri that describes how they look at WordPress plugin vulnerabilities. Contrary to popular belief, just because you hear “SQL Injection”, it doesn’t mean someone can actually hack your site. The real problem comes…

Yoast SEO vulnerability, disclosure, and forced upgrade

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Brian Krogsgard
Yoast released a new version of the WordPress SEO plugin in the last 24 hours, which fixes a blind SQL injection vulnerability. According to a post mortem by Joost de Valk, the bug wasn't caught in security audits, but was…

WordPress security whitepaper

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Brian Krogsgard
The WordPress.org website now includes a WordPress security whitepaper, donated by WordPress.com VIP. It's sparse in its current form, but it's a great start. Why does this matter? Well, a whitepaper from the official project is a great tool for…

The most popular WordPress plugins

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Brian Krogsgard
WordPress plugin popularity has always been pretty tough to figure out. We only had download counts or independent, third party website scrapers to tell us anything. Now, WordPress.org itself has more data that's being tested and launched to give us real insight into the popularity of WordPress plugins.

Wikimedia, Automattic, and others file amicus in Twitter privacy case

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Brian Krogsgard
Automattic joined Wikimedia, Medium, and other organizations in filing an amicus brief regarding Twitter's National Security Letters lawsuit against the US government. https://twitter.com/Wikimedia/status/567857616006676480 This is all a bit confusing, but the brief opens in this way: We are small Internet companies…

Licensing matters

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Brian Krogsgard
There's a popular WordPress vulnerability scanner called WPScan. To validate its popularity: it has over 1,800 commits, 750 stars, and 165 forks on Github. The scanner is used by a lot of security folks, as well as other service and…

WordPress 4.1, “Dinah”

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Brian Krogsgard
WordPress 4.1, "Dinah", has just been released. WordPress 4.1 is the result of months of work and includes a number of excellent new features. WordPress 4.1 was led by John Blackbourn, who did an outstanding job. Two hundred and eighty three…
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