Every application on the web has some security problems. It just comes with the turf. Matt, father or WordPress, answers a flamer who was too much of a chicken shit to allow comments after throwing stones at the WordPress software package.
Wincent Colaiuta has no problem throwing flames at WordPress, but doesn’t see fit to enable comments. (Apparently disabled to make Movable Type more secure.) His table-layout blog isn’t too notable but it got linked from Daring Fireball so a lot of people saw his article trying to draw the line between a routine point release and encouraging people to never use WordPress on the public internet. Here are a few points for thought in response:
- The SQL problem in 2.2 requires both registration to be enabled (off by default) and the blog to be upgraded to 2.2. It is a serious problem but I’ve heard of fewer than 5 exploits from the flaw. Even if you assume there are 100 blogs for every one we heard about, that’s still an incredibly small percentage of the millions of WordPresses out there, especially considering, as Wincent points out, the problem has been in the public for a while now.
- Getting people to upgrade web software is hard. We work as best we can with hosting companies, but a consideration is that it’s best to roll several security fixes into one release. It’s not responsible to do a release if we know of another problem, so sometimes there is a lag between an initial report and a final release, not to mention the testing required of a product used as much as WP.
- Wincent digs up the server crack that modified the files of 2.1.1 for a few days. Ignoring the fact that it was a server issue and had nothing to do with WordPress the software, we actually had NO reported exploits of the problem. (Though I’m sure there are at least a handful out there with problems, it wasn’t enough to hit our radar.) Despite that we took a hit and publicized the issue as much as we could to get the word out.
- Also about 2.1.1, the problem was found through someone proactively auditing the codebase.
- Finally Wincent says of WP “[a]nd if you insist on installing it, then you need to watch the trac like a hawk.†You would think complete transparency of the problems (it was on our bug tracker and mailing list) would be a good thing, especially considering the software Wincent uses doesn’t have a bug tracker, and the only way to submit a bug is through a contact form.
Read the full posting here.
[tags]Wordpress Security, Blogs, Web Applications[/tags]
