WordPress Worm and How to Prevent Data Loss
If you work as a webmaster and maintain several blogs, or if you just maintain your own hosted somewhere, you would know that it has some extra management costs. WordPress represents the most used platform around the web, which means that vulnerabilities will appear constantly. And the last one it’s making a big impact around the blogger platform.
This vulnerability that appeared recently attacked thousands of WordPress self-hosted blogs (WordPress.com blogs are excluded), and it’s giving a lot of users a big headache. But the good news is for those that upgrade their platform regularly and have already the latest WordPress 2.8.4 are also immune.
Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress) wrote a few days ago about this incident and extremely recommending an upgrade to WordPress 2.8.4. This is of course what we would recommend to you to apply as soon as possible.
How do I update my WordPress platform?
You didn’t have the chance to do it already? Here’s a short video (1min 20seconds) about the entire process:
How Can I be certain that my Blog will always be safe?
Simple: You can’t. You can never tell when these vulnerabilities will appear. We can recommend to you this:
- Keep your platform updated. Don’t wait until attacks are being public and in massive proportions, use always the last WordPress build.
- Keep a daily backup. On a previous post, we mentioned about Blog Backupr, a great and free tool that automates all your backups. Give it a try.
1 Comment
Good explanation of upgrading WP, but what do you do when the auto upgrade doesn’t work? I seem to have that problem on a few of our sites… and I hate the manual upgrade path.
Also – good notes on keeping your site updated – it’s very important. A couple of our sites got hacked and we were able to restore our backups (we use WP Backup Plugin from CloudBacks) very fast and then run the upgrade for protection. Luckily we had these backups running automatically every day!