Robert Scoble fails to update WordPress, gets hacked

by Graham Cluley on August 13, 2009 | Leave a comment

Filed Under: Social networks, Spam, Vulnerability

Prominent blogger Robert Scoble, who runs the Scobleizer website, has come a cropper after hackers were able to break into his site and post links to pornographic websites.

In a posting last night on Twitter, Microsoft's former technical evangelist wrote:

My blog was just hacked into. You MUST upgrade your WordPress to avoid being hacked. We fixed my version.

Robert Scoble tweets about security issue

Scoble went into further detail revealing that he not upgraded his installation of blogging software WordPress to the latest version (currently 2.8.4) which fixes a vulnerability that could allow hackers to reset the blog's administration password:

I didn't update WordPress because I used to work at Microsoft and was scared (updates sucked 1/8th of the time).. I was using an old version of WordPress and someone reset the password for the Admin account and had a little fun before we figured it out.

There are over 9 million active installations of the WordPress software, working behind-the-scenes on websites around the world. Chances are that if you regularly read blogs that you're visiting sites that are running WordPress, so it's obviously important that blog owners keep their software up-to-date and don't leave themselves vulnerable to hackers.

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About the author

Graham Cluley has worked in the computer security industry for more than 20 years, developing anti-virus software and doing quite a lot of talking about internet threats. He's won awards for his blogging, but is proudest of the text adventure games he wrote when he was still wearing short trousers. You can learn more about those (the games, not the trousers) at grahamcluley.com. Send Graham an email, subscribe to his updates on Facebook, follow him on Twitter and App.net, and circle him on Google Plus for regular updates.