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Actually, simply saying "WordPress is insecure" without reason or explanation isn't very productive at all. WordPress Core has so many eyeballs looking through

by dotBen 15y ago

Actually, simply saying "WordPress is insecure" without reason or explanation isn't very productive at all. WordPress Core has so many eyeballs looking through the code, and some great full-time engineers working on it, that's it's actually very secure. WordPress insecurities mainly occur when you add in badly written plugins - but that's not the fault of WordPress. While I don't want to verge off-topic, that's actually the root cause of most WordPress-related vectors, and so it's sad that the original post didn't really reflect on that more (other than "keep the plugin up to date")

tptacek 15y ago
This is what people said about Sendmail from 1995 through 2006. "Sure, it has a spotty track record, but so many people have looked at it that it must be the safest choice". No. Sendmail wasn't insecure because of how many people were or weren't looking at it; it was insecure because it was neither designed nor implemented for security. The continuous stream of ever-more-interesting remote code execution flaws in Sendmail were just symptoms of those two underlying flaws --- that Sendmail had a design that didn't anticipate hostile deployment environments, and that Sendmail was implemented by a team that wasn't well-versed in secure programming. WordPress has exactly the same problems, and while the pace of security flaws in WordPress has surely slowed, what security researcher believes it has come close to stopping? I stand by this comment I wrote almost two years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1328261 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1328261 Incidentally, "the security of WordPress plugins isn't the fault of Wordpress" is a dodge, because the severity of WordPress plugin flaws is a consequence of the fact that all WordPress plugins are just PHP programs with the same access as e.g. the code that handles site administration. I recommend that people who care about security avoid WordPress, but if you don't want to do that, there are plenty of things you can do to mitigate your exposure. Yelling about whether that exposure exists at all is not one of the things I would recommend.

by dotBen 15y ago

tptacek 15y ago

This is what people said about Sendmail from 1995 through 2006. "Sure, it has a spotty track record, but so many people have looked at it that it must be the safest choice". No. Sendmail wasn't insecure because of how many people were or weren't looking at it; it was insecure because it was neither designed nor implemented for security. The continuous stream of ever-more-interesting remote code execution flaws in Sendmail were just symptoms of those two underlying flaws --- that Sendmail had a design that didn't anticipate hostile deployment environments, and that Sendmail was implemented by a team that wasn't well-versed in secure programming. WordPress has exactly the same problems, and while the pace of security flaws in WordPress has surely slowed, what security researcher believes it has come close to stopping? I stand by this comment I wrote almost two years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1328261 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1328261 Incidentally, "the security of WordPress plugins isn't the fault of Wordpress" is a dodge, because the severity of WordPress plugin flaws is a consequence of the fact that all WordPress plugins are just PHP programs with the same access as e.g. the code that handles site administration. I recommend that people who care about security avoid WordPress, but if you don't want to do that, there are plenty of things you can do to mitigate your exposure. Yelling about whether that exposure exists at all is not one of the things I would recommend.