Old Wordpress Sites Exploited And Security Questioned

Apparently this weekend, a major exploit attack has been taking place on old versions of self-hosted blogging platform Wordpress. If you are using Wordpress for your blog, you should update immediately.

The truth is that this weekend is no different than any other weekend with regards to Wordpress. Old versions of the blogging platform have, and will, continue to be exploited. Back in April, I switched from Drupal to Wordpress and within 24 hours, my sites were exploited. Since then I've been exploited and/or hacked at least a dozen times on my various sites. Apparently it's nearly impossible to figure out the specific cause. The worst part about being hacked is that it can affect your rankings inGoogle (NSDQ: GOOG) which results in a lower amount of search engine traffic and ultimately, revenue.

Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg is participating in a discussion thread on Friendfeed about the latest news about Wordpress exploits. Mullenweg has also put together his thoughts on how to keep your Wordpress blog secure.

The bottom line is simple - if you run outdated versions of any piece of software you risk your security.

As an interesting aside, my sites ran on Drupal for three years and never one exploit. One of my sites is using vBulletin for our forums and in over six years, it too has never been exploited or hacked. Some say that the "value" is higher to exploit a Wordpress blog.

Swiss blogger Corsin Camichel put together a list of suggestions for the Wordpress team to help make the blogging platform immediately more secure for new installations. Digitizor has some tips to check to see if your blog is currently hacked. I found a number of exploits on my site by searching Google for Viagra and Cialis with my site name. It would be great if the Google Webmaster tool displayed a message when a site has been penalized for suspicious content.

My suggestions include a tool to notify you when a new user is added, notification when any files are modified and a plugin verification system where Wordpress can "certify" that a plugin is safe to use.

Mullenweg concludes his post with the following promise, "The only thing that I can promise will keep your blog secure today and in the future is upgrading." I used to wait a bit before upgrading to make sure the kinks were worked out but going forward I will push out any upgrades as soon as possible.

10 Reasons to dump Blogger and date Wordpress right NOW!

Which is your favorite blogging platform - WordPress or Blogger? A majority of bloggers answer that they started with Google's Blogger but have shifted to WordPress now. Well, that doesn't prove WordPress is a better blogging platform than Blogger. Invariably, the choice depends upon your requirements. Before you choose any of these two blogging platform, it's most important for you to delve into the key areas of blogger and WordPress and see which of the two is ideal for that purpose. As for us we see Wordpress take over Blogger in several features that reciprocates a bloggers needs. This is what compled us to provide 10 reasons to dumpBlogger for Wordpress.

1. Customization

WordPress offers a several plugins for customization that includes a wide collection of free themes. Well, Blogspot doesn't completely support the plugins and that minimizes the ambit for customization.

Moreover onchanging a Blogger template you lose all your previous changes. Whereas in WordPress even after changing a template you can preserve the previous link customization.

2. Creating Static Pages

Those of you who are looking for a lightweight blog with static pages, Blooger offers no help. WordPress is your only choice. You can create posts or pages. In WordPress Static pages are listed in separate menus.

3. Import facilities

Blogger allows you to import items only from Blogger blog. WordPress offers wider options for imports that includes Blogger, Yahoo! 360, Live·JournaI, Type·Pad, MovabIe·Type or another WordPress blog. With the import feature you can even import all the blogger blogs to Wordpress.

4. Adding Images

WordPress is a far better CMS for image storage and display than Blogger. Firstly, WordPress.com offers 3 GB of image storage space as compared to 1 Gb by Blogger. Secondly, Blogger features no interface to browse through the image except if you sign up for Picasa Web Album. Wordpress offers .ppt, .doc, .odt and .pdf files.

5. Interface

WordPress is a better platform for people who would like to add creative touches to their blog. WordPress features an in-depth and well-furnished interface. For any pro-blogger it's an added attraction. With some easy tweaks unsing a few Wordpress tools you could create user interface that offers all you want.

Although Blogger's interface is extremely easy to use interface, there not much workable tools to tweak the interface to make it more handy.

6. User friendly

Commenting on a page in Blogger is far more complicated than WordPress. Well, it's like making a mountain out of a molehill. WordPress goes easy with it, just - Read, Scroll and Leave Comment.

7. Possibly related posts

This Possibly related posts in WordPress supposedly links to other posts site-wide (meaning the entire WP.com community) that are related. Although you might find that the links provided on your blog are irrelevant. It could provide a couple of tweaks using CSS to make it a handy feature. Blogger has a good search but no such features for related posts

8. Handling Team blogs

In Blogger only administrators and non-administrator can access the blog. WordPress has wider options for control that includes administrator, author, editor and contributor.

9. Security

WordPress offers better security with its default akismet spam protection. That's great for spam control. Blogger offers no spam checks by default.

10 Customer service

Although  WordPress and Blogger both doesn't seem to offer much customer support, but WordPress provides a resource where you can contact customer service through email. WordPress forum seems to be more responsive.

Conclusion

Generally, Blogger seems to be a better option for those running personal blogs. Well, actually blogger is simple and easy to handle that makes it favorite for newbies in blogosphere. However, the seasoned pros can find a lot more to explore in WordPress to take their blogging to the next level.

Increase WordPress Speed With AskApache Crazy Cache Plugin

Regular readers hopefully will have noticed significant improvements in site speed.  This is thanks to some amazing work by the AskApache team who have spent a lot of time fixing errors in my WordPress and server installations, and have tweaked my server and wordpress setups.  They aren’t quite finished yet and there’s a second round of tweaks to come, but so far I’ve been happy with their work.

One tweak that they implemented which will benefit all WordPress sites using a caching plugin, is adding the AskApache Crazy Cache plugin.  This plugin caches all posts on your blog, so that all readers always see a cached version if it’s available, rather than just repeat readers.

More: AskApache Crazy Cache plugin

How To Stop Spam WordPress Registrations

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve seen a significant increase in the number of  ’users’ registering on my blog, getting up to 30 per day.  Given that users don’t need to register on my site to leave comments, then these registrations are coming from spammers trying to leave register in case they need to leave comments.

Luckily, I moved over to the fantastic Disqus commenting system a few weeks ago which is thrawting these spammers.  It’s also reduced the amount of comment spam I get in general, because the spambots clearly haven’t turned their attentions to Disqus yet, or Disqus has better protection than wordpress.

If you don’t want to switch to Disqus (I would recommend doing so), then you could try intalling the SABRE WordPress Plugin.  This plugin offers a number of tools to stop wordpress spam registrations:

1. Inclusion of a captcha in the registration form
2. Selection of the captcha’s complexity
3. Selection of the background colour for the captcha image
4. Inclusion of a math test in the registration form
5. Selection of the math test’s complexity
6. Random or fixed choice of the test to run
7. Unobstrusive tests to detect if registration is done by humans or not
8. Registration blocked if Javascript is unsupported by the browser
9. Registration blocked if visitor’s IP address is found on ban lists
10. The blog administrator can validate the user registration
11. The user can validate his registration by clicking on a link sent by mail
12. Limit the number of days to confirm registration. Without beeing confirmed within the period of time, the user account is disabled
13. Log on prohibited before confirmation
14. User is allowed to choose his password when registering on the blog
15. User must agree with a warning text, disclaimer or general policy note when registering
16. User must give an invitation code during registration
17. Main statistics displayed on the blog’s dashboard
18. Custom logo on logon/registration screen