Dinsdag is versie 2.8.5 van WordPress uitgebracht. Met dit programma, dat onder de gpl-licentie beschikbaar gesteld wordt, is het mogelijk een weblog op te zetten en bij te houden. WordPress kan naar eigen zeggen binnen vijf minuten draaien, mits er al een server met php en MySQL beschikbaar is. Naast bloggen is het ook mogelijk om de functionaliteit van WordPress verder uit te breiden en het uiterlijk door middel van plugins en themes aan te passen. In de afgelopen maanden is er hard gewerkt aan versie 2.9 van WordPress. Naast nieuwe features wordt daarin ook aandacht aan de beveiliging besteed. Een aantal van deze beveiligingsverbeteringen zijn nu ook in de 2.8-tak te gebruiken:
WordPress 2.8.5: Hardening Release
As you know over the past couple of months we have been working on the new features for WordPress 2.9. We have also been working on trying to make WordPress as secure as possible and during this process we have identified a number of security hardening changes that we thought were worth back-porting to the 2.8 branch so as to get these improvements out there and make all your sites as secure as possible.
The headline changes in this release are:We would recommend that all sites are upgraded to this new version of WordPress to ensure that you have the best available protection.
- A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
- Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
- Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
- Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.
If you think your site may have been hit by one of the recent exploits and you would like to make sure that you have cleared out all traces of the exploit then we would recommend that you take a look at the WordPress Exploit Scanner. This is a plugin which searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious. It also examines your list of active plugins for unusual filenames. You can read more about this plugin here – “WordPress Exploit Scanner“