Standard Mischief

Normally I wouldn’t post this, but I know of a few people with brand spanking new WordPress blogs, who went with the 2.1 version of WordPress. Well, if your are using something downloaded within the last few days…

Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.

Longer explanation: This morning we received a note to our security mailing address about unusual and highly exploitable code in WordPress. The issue was investigated, and it appeared that the 2.1.1 download had been modified from its original code. We took the website down immediately to investigate what happened.

It was determined that a cracker had gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers wordpress.org, and had used that access to modify the download file. We have locked down that server for further forensics, but at this time it appears that the 2.1.1 download was the only thing touched by the attack. They modified two files in WP to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution….

Also, y’all might want to add this WordPress RSS feed to your aggravator, which is how I found out about it.

(It should not affect people still on the 2.0.9 branch, like myself)