Defensio and WordPress

Posted by on April 26, 2008, 8:46am, 1,158 views

A couple of online services I use regularly have announced security upgrades overnight.

Wordpress 2.51 has been released.

From the announcement: “It includes a number of bug fixes, performance enhancements, and one very important security fix. We recommend everyone update immediately, particularly if your blog has open registration. The vulnerability is not public but it will be shortly.”

In addition to the security fix, 2.5.1 contains many bug fixes.

The anti-spam utility I use on this site and a couple of others is Defensio.

They sent me an intriguing email saying: “We have reasons to believe that a few of our api keys might have been compromised and our research indicates that your key(s) might be among them.”

Filtering was disabled and I had to generate new API keys.

“We are truly sorry for the inconvenience this will cause you, but we thought we’d be upfront about it and prevent any damage from happening. Of course, the proper measures were taken to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

It sounds like there’s a longer story to tell. I am happy though with Defensio’s frankness and action.

It always puzzles me why people are out there busily try to break into programs to undermine them. If their talents were used to create instead of to wreck …

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Comments

2 Responses to “Defensio and WordPress”

  1. Carl Mercier on April 26th, 2008 9:29am

    Sorry but there really is no “longer story to tell”. Just thought we’d be very upfront about our concerns. Nobody was hacked or anything, this was just a prevention. Have a good weekend!

  2. Michael Gorey on April 26th, 2008 5:06pm

    Thanks Carl, I’m pleased to hear it. Why not post some details on your blog to explain what happened and how you fixed it?

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