>By Siobhan McKeown | wp.smashingmagazine.com

WordPress security is serious business. Exploits of vulnerabilities in WordPress’ architecture have led to mass compromises of servers through cross-site contamination. WordPress’ extensibility increases its vulnerability; plugins and themes house flawed logic, loopholes, Easter eggs, backdoors and a slew of other issues. Firing up your computer to find that you’re supporting a random cause or selling Viagra can be devastating. 

In WordPress’ core, all security issues are quickly addressed; the WordPress team is focused on strictly maintaining the integrity of the application. The same, however, cannot be said for all plugins and themes.

The focus of this post is not to add to the overwhelming number of WordPress security or WordPress hardening posts that you see floating around the Web. Rather, we’ll provide more context about the things you need to protect yourself from. What hacks are WordPress users particularly vulnerable to? How do they get in? What do they do to a WordPress website? In this lengthy article, we’ll cover backdoors, drive-by downloads, pharma hack and malicious redirects. Please notice that some anti-virus apps report this article as malware, probably because it contains examples of the code that should be avoided. This article does not contain any malware itself, so the alert must be based on heuristic analysis.

Over the past two years, Web malware has grown around 140%. At the same time, WordPress has exploded in popularity as a blogging platform and CMS, powering close to 17% of websites today. But that popularity comes at a price; it makes WordPress a target for Web-based malware. Why? Simple: its reach provides the opportunity for maximum impact. Sure, popularity is a good thing, but it also makes us WordPress users vulnerable.

(Smashing’s side note: Have you already bought the Smashing Book #3? The book introduces the latest practical techniques and a whole new mindset for progressive Web design. Get your book today!)

A Bit About Our Security Expert: Meet Tony

Lacking the technical knowledge needed to go into great depth, I brought on board a co-author to help me out. Bringing the technical information is Tony Perez, Chief Operations and Financial Officer of Sucuri Security. Sucuri Security provides detection, alerting and remediation services to combat Web-based malware. In other words, it works on websites that have been compromised. This means that Tony has the background, statistics and, most importantly, knowledge to go really in depth on malware issues that affect WordPress users.

I asked Tony how he got into Web security:

“I think it goes back to 2009. I was managing and architecting large-scale enterprise solutions for Department of Defense (DoD) clients and traveling the world. In the process, there was a little thing called compliance with the Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG), set forth by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). I know, a mouthful, but it’s how we did things in the DoD; if it didn’t have an acronym, it didn’t belong.

That being said, it wasn’t until I joined Dre and Daniel at Sucuri Security, in early 2011, that I really began to get what I consider to be any resemblance of InfoSec chops.”

Armed with Tony’s technical knowledge, we’ll look at the main issues that affect WordPress users today. But before we get into details, let’s look at some of the reasons why WordPress users might be vulnerable.

What Makes WordPress Vulnerable?

Here’s the simple answer. Old versions of WordPress, along with theme and plugin vulnerabilities, multiplied by the CMS’ popularity, with the end user thrown into the mix, make for a vulnerable website.

Let’s break that down.

The first issue is outdated versions of WordPress. Whenever a new WordPress version is released, users get a nagging message, but plenty of users have gotten pretty good at ignoring the nag. Core vulnerabilities in themselves are rarely an issue. They do exist; proof can be found in the most recent 3.3.3 and 3.4.1 releases. WordPress’ core team has gotten pretty good at rolling out security patches quickly and efficiently, so the risk of exploitation is minimal, provided that WordPress users update their installation. This, unfortunately, is the crux of the problem:WordPress users ignore the message. And it’s not just inexperienced and casual WordPress users who aren’t updating. A recent high-profile hack was of the Reuters website, which was running version 3.1.1 instead of the current 3.4.1.

Vulnerabilities in plugins and themes is another issue. The WordPress repository has 20,000 plugins and is growing. The plugins are of varying quality; some of them inevitably have security loopholes, while others are outdated. On top of that, consider all of the themes and plugins outside of the repository, including commercial products that are distributed for free on Warez websites and come packed with malware. Google is our favorite search engine, but it’s not so hot for finding quality WordPress themes.

Then, there’s popularity. WordPress is popular, without a doubt. Around 700 million websites were recorded as using WordPress in May of this year. This popularity means that if a hacker can find a way into one WordPress website, they have potentially millions of websites for a playground. They don’t need to hack websites that use the current version of WordPress; they can scan for websites that use old insecure versions and hack those.

Finally and most significantly, the biggest obstacle facing WordPress users is themselves. Tony in his own words:

“For whatever reason, there is this perception among WordPress users that the hardest part of the job was paying someone to build the website and that once its built, that’s it, it’s done, no further action required. Maybe that was the case seven years ago, but not today.

WordPress’ ease of use is awesome, but I think it provides a false sense of assurances to end users and developers alike. I think, though, this perception is starting to change.”

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