When it comes the security of WordPress there are unfortunately a lot of people out there spreading bad information. We were on the receiving end of one of these in the past few days. We received an email from xpedientdigitalmedia.com trying to get us to promote an infographic on WordPress security from their website WPTemplate.com. You can tell how much they care about security when you see this:
Keeping WordPress up to date is one the basic security measures that you need to doing to make sure your website is secure. If you are website about WordPress you have no excuse for not keeping it up to date, especially when the release notice for the new version, that was released last month, warns:
This is a security release for all previous versions and we strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately.
Amazingly their security advice includes making sure to keep WordPress up to date, but they don’t follow their own advice and you shouldn’t either.
It really isn’t worth going through all of the bad information they managed to pack in to their infographic, but here are a couple of really bad pieces of advice:
One of their security recommendations is “Do not install WordPress themes that are available for free.”. Something being free doesn’t make it insecure and something costing money doesn’t make it secure. WordPress is free, would that make it insecure? Do they think that the free themes on the WordPress website are insecure?
The second one is doozy. They claim that one of the “most common ways that result in the site being hacked” is “approving comments that are non relevant”. This isn’t even a way to be hacked, much less a common one. If adding a comment could lead to your website being hacked that would be a huge security vulnerability and the solution wouldn’t be to not approve irrelevant comments. What would stop someone from exploiting the vulnerability with a relevant comment instead?
Unfortunately their bad advice isn’t just on their website. A lot of websites have taken up their offer to spread the thing, including noupe, WP Daily Themes, and WP Daily. Incidentally, WP Daily titled their post on WordPress 3.5.2 UH OH. WP 3.5.2 SECURITY UPDATE. DO THIS NOW. and yet they didn’t:
A Step To Actually Improve WordPress Security
Currently if a plugin in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory is found to have a security vulnerability and it is not fixed the plugin is removed from the Plugin Directory. Unfortunately anyone who is already using the plugin is not provided any alert that the plugin is known to be insecure. We have been pushing for this situation to be handled properly for some time. Until an alert is added in WordPress itself, you can get a more limited version of this functionality using our No Longer in Directory plugin.