Malware

Tech Roundup Week Ending July 28

Mike Demopoulos

July 27, 2023

WordPress 6.3 Release Candidate 2 – WordPress News WordPress 6.3 Release Candidate 2 is available for download and testing. It is currently under development and should not be installed on production or critical websites. It is scheduled for release on…

Tech Roundup Week Ending July 21

Mike Demopoulos

July 21, 2023

TechThe Week in Review

WordPress 6.3 to Introduce a Development Mode WordPress 6.3 will introduce a new development mode. This mode can be initiated by declaring the WP_DEVELOPMENT_MODE constant. It is not recommended for production sites. Possible values for WP_DEVELOPMENT_MODE include core, plugin, theme,…

Tech Roundup Week Ending July 14

Mike Demopoulos

July 14, 2023

TechThe Week in Review

Post Status Tech Roundup Week Ending July 14

Tech Roundup Week Ending July 7

Mike Demopoulos

July 8, 2023

TechThe Week in Review

WordPress Dropping support for PHP 5 WordPress has announced that they will discontinue support for PHP 5 in the upcoming WordPress version 6.3, set to release on August 8, 2023. This decision implies that the new minimum supported PHP version…

Tech Roundup Week Ending June 30

Mike Demopoulos

July 3, 2023

TechThe Week in Review

iThemes: Why WordPress Malware Scanners Are Worthless In a thought-provoking article recently published on iThemes, the effectiveness of WordPress malware scanners is critically examined. The article suggests these tools may not be as reliable as users hope, often failing to…

Business Roundup Week Ending April 14

Mike Demopoulos

April 14, 2023

BusinessThe Week in Review

WordPress Turns 20 Resource Hub We are calling all WordPressers! It's been 20 incredible years of coding, creating, and dreaming. WP has grown from a blog platform to power an ever-growing percentage of the world's websites -- let that sink…

Post Status Excerpt (No. 67) — What Does Professionalism Mean in WordPress?

Dan Knauss

September 2, 2022

BusinessDesign

Dan and Eric discuss their top picks for WordPress news stories of the week and the topic of professionalism. What is it — what does it mean for us in the WordPress community, and how does it relate to a healthy open source project and business ecosystem?

Sites hacked with fake CloudFlare DDoS alerts infected with RATs

Dan Knauss

August 22, 2022

NotesSecurity

Remote Access Trojans (RATs) are new to me — apparently, you can get one on a Windows machine as a malware payload from fake CloudFlare DDoS alert pages on hacked WordPress sites. Ben Martin at Sucuri explains "a recent surge…

Nulled Themes and Plugins

Dan Knauss

August 1, 2022

NotesSecurity

My first experiences with "nulled" (or back in the day "cracked") software date back to the golden days of the Atari 8-bit and Commodore Amiga. Blank floppy disks were cheap, and like most kids, I did not have a lot…

Post Status Excerpt (No. 4) – Our Job Board, Post Status Gigs, and WordPress Settings

David Bisset

April 2, 2021

PlanetPost Status Podcasts

David and Cory talk about the Post Status job board and #gigs Slack channel, as well as WordPress settings screens that make Brian scream. 😱

This is a security nightmare: a…

Dan Knauss

February 12, 2021

DesignSecurity

This is a security nightmare: a researcher managed to breach over 35 major companies' internal systems (including Microsoft, Apple, PayPal, Shopify, and more) in a software supply chain attack. 😱 The attack comprised uploading malware to open source repositories including…

Sucuri has found some malware that…

Dan Knauss

October 16, 2020

Security

Sucuri has found some malware that can disable security plugins to avoid detection. 😨 This is really devious! Luke Leal explains: "If a user tries to reactivate one of the disabled security plugins, [the Malware] will momentarily appear to activate…

Add this to the list of…

Dan Knauss

July 31, 2020

Add this to the list of crappy things in 2020: Ben Martin at Sucuri shares another newly discovered variation of a credit card swiper he found on a WordPress WooCommerce site. 💳 Ben says, "2020 appears to be the year…

Ben Martin, who is Sucuri’s Remediation…

Dan Knauss

April 18, 2020

Ben Martin, who is Sucuri's Remediation Team Lead, breaks down the way dedicated credit card swiping malware works within WordPress. 💳 This is not common, but as Ben points out, we can expect more of it: "With WooCommerce recently overtaking…

Cloudflare has introduced 1.1.1.1 for Families,…

Dan Knauss

April 10, 2020

Cloudflare has introduced 1.1.1.1 for Families, an easy way to "to add a layer of protection to your home network and protect it from malware and adult content."

Wordfence published a comprehensive whitepaper analyzing…

Dan Knauss

November 22, 2019

Wordfence published a comprehensive whitepaper analyzing WP-VCD, which is the name for an intensifying malware campaign that is spread via “nulled” or pirated plugins and themes. ☠️