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It is no secret that we are huge supporters, advocates, and users of WordPress. It is definitely the best free Content Management System (CMS) around (we think its better than anything others charge for, too)! WordPress is wildly popular and used by millions of people across the internet because of its ease-of-use, extensibility, and price (free!).

WordPress benefits in the following ways due to its large and loyal user base:

• A vibrant user community that actively develops plug-ins and themes to improve its functionality and aesthetics
• A large number of skilled designers and developers able to work on it
• Sustained improvements and upgrades over time
• A large number of specially trained users who will use, review, and fix issues (such as security or user-interface experts)
• Vast amounts of free support and assistance for almost any problem imaginable

Just like anything else, however, someone is always someone trying to ruin the fun. In WordPress’ case, hackers are now looking to exploit the system because figuring out just one loophole would mean that they could gain access to millions of websites.

This type of thing goes for any software that is widely used – Just look at Microsoft versus every other operating system. Microsoft is targeted because, among other reasons, it has the most users.  If you figure out just one little virus or exploit, you could infect a very large amount of people.

Back to the issue at hand… WordPress security.  Yesterday, WordPress was attacked by a worm that infected older versions of WordPress and allowed hackers to gain access to the WordPress system, all the way to the database. The important piece of that sentence is that it infected ‘older versions’.  If you were up-to-date with your WordPress install you didn’t have a thing to worry about.

Trust me, the good significantly outweighs the bad for WordPress.  Don’t let a few hackers scare you away from using WordPress. At the same time, you must be proactive and always be upgrading your WordPress install to the latest release.  If you skip this part you are very susceptible to hackers exploiting older versions of the CMS.