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Monday, July 4th, 2005, 3:43 pm

Server-side Software Turns Evil

It was only a few months ago that my colleague’s forum got hijacked and vandalised, never to come back on-line again. Over the weekend, my host came under a denial of service (DoS) attack because of outdated, non-secure installations of phpBB (not worthy linking to), which proved to be far from reliable. Several sites including mine were suspended for hours in order to avoid another such attack, which brought the server down and crippled it for 40 minutes. I was possibly among the culprits as my phpBB installation was not patched up properly.

hacker buttonWordPress 1.5 likewise. Security flaws are continuously discovered and about 4 fixes have been released in the past few months. If you install software, make sure it is secure, patched up and avoid installing it whenever unnecessary. More installations lead to more maintenance and potential loopholes.
 

One Response to “Server-side Software Turns Evil”

  1. Stripy T-Shirt Says:

    What kind of Person Hacks OSS?
    I don’t quite understand why anyone would hack open source software like WordPress but apparently someone has.
    I knew that there was a new version of WordPress (1.5.1.3) that had some security updates but I didn’t realise quite how bad t…

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