Robert Scoble fails to update WordPress, gets hacked

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 is senior technology consultant at Sophos. The readers of Computer Weekly voted him security blogger of the year in 2009 and 2010, and he pipped Stephen Fry to the title of "Twitter user of the year" too. Which was nice. He was also named "Best Security Blogger" by the readers of SC Magazine in 2011. You can subscribe to Graham's updates on Facebook, follow him on Twitter and circle him on Google Plus for regular updates.