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Let me stress that this is NOT a fault in WP 2.3. I had this in 2.1. It’s just that most everyone has upgraded and since their upgrades are new and this phenomena is new, they assume that they are connected. They are not.

My web host now has a post on their pages saying that not only WordPress but also Joomla and other CMS systems have been targeted in the same manner.

They say that in most cases it is because the file configuration.php has been readable and even in some cases writable by others.

I have now changed the permissions to make it unwritable, but WP doesn’t work at all unless this file is readable to all. It needs to be at least 444. This is as you all know where the database password is openly written, and the database is where the links to the spam has been entered.

My host’s web page goes on to say that we need to change the MySQL password for the database. This I have done, but the new password is just as openly written in the config file as the old one.

They also say that it is a good idea to upgrade to MySQL 5.x, but I don’t know if WP will run smoothly on that? I remember there was sometalk about that a while ago, but I cannot find anything now.

I’m starting to think that it’s a weakness with the very construction of the WP configuration file system, having a password written in plain text like that. Someone has finally figured out how to make use of it and this can be the beginning of many other more serious attacks.

Hmm. Can somebody tell me what those italics-, b-quote, and so on-buttons are called so that I know what term to search for?

Thanks.

I have the same situation but it has nothing to do with version 2.3.

I hadn’t upgraded since 2.1.3 when I noticed this today. I then upgraded to 2.3.1 and of course it did nothing.

The odd thing is that the blogroll in the sidebar includes one of my post categories (“Projects”) that I have never set to be a link category. Yet the links count on the Blogroll/Categories page is my number of regular posts in that category + the number of spam links that only show up in the sidebar.

If I delete this unwanted link category, I would think that my posts go as well since they are included in the count and the category in both places have the same ID.

But who added “Projecs” as a link category? I have no users.

Temporary solution: All spam I have is in this one category which shouldn’t even be in the sidebar. Simply excluding it in the list makes the spam invisible.

You have given me a few things to think about here. Maybe the reason why my incoming links haven’t gotten spammed is that not even the spammers know that I exist. I seem to have had exactly 3 sites linking to me in the past 12 months or so. And about as many comments.

I’m not really deep enough into the blogosphere to understand what all these external things do. I’ve tried to look into a few of them but I only ended up feeling stupid. And displaying a lot of stats about no visitors and no interest will only be depressing.

It’s a lot like those counters we used to put on our pages a decade ago, isn’t it? The ones where we had to cheat eventually and start on a few thousand because the counters only really showed that nobody cared. Only now it’s called DeLiCious or Tecnocrati and whathaveyou. I don’t understand it all. I think I’m getting old. I have apparently now burnt a feed or something. That’s always something. And I have a list of top commentators. (The current record being 2 comments) 🙂