Upgrade Your Installations… now.

With the apparent hacking of the Applephoneshow.com blog and others floating around, it’s become known that there are various exploits in older version of the popular Wordpress blogging/CMS platform running anything that’s older than version 2.3.3.

Frankly, if you have a Wordpress blog or any site (there are vulnerabilities for basically everything out there) you have a responsibility to others viewing your site and yourself (to prevent things like Technorati and other search engine de-listing) to upgrade, since obsolete code could allow hackers to inject unwanted links as well as code that can execute download spyware on your visitors’ computers.

If your host for some reason can’t support it, you should go change hosts or upgrade (it won’t be much money). Code does become obsolete; so it’s important to keep on top of things for the sake of your site, your search ranking, and your brand.. you don’t want to be known as the company that gave people who visited your site viruses.

p.s. - Some people think that it’s an intentional un-ending cycle by developers to keep having holes. It’s really not. It’s a cat-and-mouse game because no code is infallible.

Special thanks to @johnfoster for picking up the source article from Geek Ramblings, with a very cool header image. Fighting robots rock.

Addendum: Big blog ZDnet was hacked as well, and the problem is pretty wide-spread among non-upgraded sites.  Not to mention, here’s confirmation Technorati is delisting non-upgraded blogs.