Posts Tagged ‘security’

Have you upgraded yet?

April 16, 2008 by Emily

Around the Web

WordPress 2.5 has been out for over 2 weeks, have you upgraded yet? I waited about a week to make sure there were no major issues right after the release, but as of this past weekend all my personal/business WP sites as well an a good portion of my client’s sites have been upgraded. If you haven’t upgraded yet, what are you waiting for?

I’ve come across several bloggers who are waiting for the release of 2.5.1. I can’t really blame them for this logic. It should fix all of the major bugs that have cropped up and by the time it comes out in two or three weeks time, plugin authors who were behind the times, should have finally upgraded their plugins. Normally, I might agree with them and for a moment, I even considered this myself, until I read this announcement on Technorati that “vulnerable” WordPress blogs are no longer being indexed. What constitutes a vulnerable blog? Anything that is NOT WordPress 2.5.

This announcement seemed kind of bullying to me at first: UPGRADE OR ELSE! But they have a point. There are valid security problems in older versions of WP. If you care about your site, then security should be your number 1 concern. I certainly don’t mean to post this to scare people or to say that there is anything wrong with using WordPress, but I know from years of first hand experience that MANY people do not take security seriously. I can promise you, as soon as your site has been hacked, this is something you are going to take seriously. A few days ago I upgraded a WordPress site that was still using version 1.5! That’s at least 2 years old and there’s really no excuse for it. If you don’t keep current you are pretty much inviting hackers to your website.