Donncha gives WordPress users a reminder to upgrade our WordPress blogs in light of possible security risks. Donncha know you have to upgrade WP!? Okay, bad pun. At any rate, this is in view of well-publicized attacks last April which has probably left a lot of WordPress-powered blogs still vulnerable. I myself found that a good number of my personal blogs had been affected, with passwords saved on my root folder in clear text, extra admin-level users in the database, and some theme files modified.

Donncha recaps the possible symptoms of this particular hack (and possibly others, too), which include:

• Hidden code
• Hidden admin-level users, visible only in database tables
• Blog and database passwords, saved as clear-text files
• Code disguised as JPG files
• Bots trying to break in (can be checked via the logs)

And the steps recommended to mitigate or at least minimize the risks are to:

• Upgrade your blog software to the latest version
• Check your database for unknown or malicious insertions or entries
• Check your web folder and subdirectories for malicious files
• Check your theme files (and perhaps even core blog software files) for insertions

To the untrained eye, most of these steps might not be too easy, but if you’ve been working on blogs for some time now, it won’t be too difficult to spot these problems. For me, perhaps the best way to mitigate the risks is by doing a full export of blog content, and comments, backing up media files and plugins wiping the entire hosting account clear, doing a fresh blog software install, and importing the content. The plugins and media files should then be added back, making sure you only put in the necessary plugins (i.e., don’t upload plugins that you won’t activate anyway), and media files that you have verified to be clean.

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