Morgan Todd Lewistown, PA: Why not to use WordPress for you Automotive Blog

In regards to questions on my post about Wordpress blogs. Number one let me make perfectly clear as stated in the post “Wordpress is an impressive software package that allows individuals with minimal understanding of web design to put together a web site rapidly, and for personal use it is unmatched”

The second thing I should mention is that just because your wordpress site has not been defaced that does not mean it could not be or has not been hacked. Hackers attack sites and applications for various reasons, weather that be to test their skill set, deface sites with their tags and graphics, site hijacking, scanning databases for personal information, and the list of reasons go on and on. Doing a simple search of wordpress hacked will bring back thousands of results with most of them pointing to information on how to recover from a hacked wordpress site. Trust me all the various security gurus out there would not of taken the time to cover the topic in such great detail if it was not a major issue.

Yes Wordpress is an open source software package. What that means is the easy of developers to tweak code and/or add custom plug-ins is available. What that also means is the hackers don't have to do much work to know the layout of your site's files, the structure of your database, where your site upload pages are, which pages include your database connection information, which pages contain your data queries, etc.. Again running a simple website or blog that is not collection user information, and is updated regularly is not at great risk but it is still at risk.

Recovering from a compromised site can be a costly and time consuming project.

Having worked as an application security & development annalist for over the last 20 years, I can not begin to count the number of people who I have had to help recover from a wordpress hacked site. Sadly most of them were running simple little sites that really had no need for all the bloated code that comes in a premade cms template. All that being said I'm not going to ask anyone to take my word for it each individual should do their own due diligence and research the topic for themselves. Here are some great links to get you started.