David Ensor

I’m not talking about the H1N1 virus here…though, I was taking antibiotics by Sunday for a sinus infection.  For a few months, one of my clients had been getting a weird error popping up on their WordPress web site. I was (rightly) convinced that there was a security issue causing the problem, but I searched the web high and low without ever finding anything to point to a cause of the problem. I searched for a particular string of text that came up repeatedly when it was broken and the best I could find was a “fix” to correct the issue.

Saturday morning, the answer finally came to me in an email – a WordPress security exploit.  Months of suspicions proved true and I was left to carefully analyze the server database for corruption over the ensuing hours.  Despite my hesitation to upgrade the site’s WP version (if you only knew how many customizations, hacks and mods there were on this web site…), I went forth with it and haven’t seen the problem return.

Moral of the story – you have to keep an eye on security updates and make sure to carefully upgrade after doing functional testing!

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 3:39 pm and is filed under web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.