Tag Archive | "wordpress 2.6.1"

WordPress 2.6.2

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

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Yesterday, WordPress 2.6.2 was released to address the SQL Column Truncation and mt_rand() vulnerabilities. This release also includes a few other minor bug fixes. (Details of other bug fixes can be found here)Here's an excerpt from the WordPress blog to give you an idea on how the vulnerabilities can be used to attack blogs with open user registration.With open registration enabled, it is possible in WordPress versions 2.6.1 and earlier to craft a username such that it will allow resetting another user’s password to a randomly generated password. The randomly generated password is not disclosed to the attacker, so this problem by itself is annoying but not a security exploit. However, this attack coupled with a weakness in the random number seeding in mt_rand() could be used to predict the randomly generated password.

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Update to Akismet 2.1.8

Sunday, September 7, 2008

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The first thing I did when I went back to blogging was to make sure my WordPress installation was up-to-date so I upgraded it to the latest version which was WordPress 2.6.1. I also updated all the plugins that I have via the Plugins section of the dashboard. One of the plugins I updated was Akismet and at that time, the version available was 2.1.7. All upgrades went smoothly and I was able to post my last entry, reply to some comments, check blog stats and other stuff.Because of the 3 month long hiatus, I wasn't able to do much with my blog except for approving comments. Spam comments have piled up and numbered at the thousands. No matter how much spam comments I have, I always make it a habit/practice to check the spam queue for valid comments. When I was done going through the list, I clicked on the Delete All button and waited for the spam comments to disappear. It was taking quite a while to finish and at first I thought it was taking long because of the large amount of spam comments I had but when I saw that the browser stopped loading and the spam comments were still there I knew something was wrong. Anyways, I tried doing it again and ended up repeating the process like three times to no avail.

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