Duncan's Security Blog An enthusiasts musings

15Jul/150

Regarding WordPress security

Over the last few years, WordPress has been the subject of much abuse. First from people of questionable intent, who may or may not disclose any security holes they find, and secondly from bystanders who comment on any disclosed vulnerabilities (of which there have been many). However, there are a few important things to note when regarding WordPress security. I will be discussing these points in this blog post.

Responsibility

A question needs to be asked as to where the responsibility lies with respect to securing a WordPress website. In short, both WordPress and the website owner are responsible. WordPress is a framework for creating websites (it is not just a CMS system). As such, WordPress is responsible for delivering secure code to their customers. However, they cannot do much more than that. The site owner (who may or may not be the developer), is responsible for decisions made both during implementation, as well as post implementation. Decisions like hosting platform, plugins, SSL configuration and database configuration are all out of WordPress' control.

WordPress have consistently proven that if a vulnerability is their responsibility, it is taken care of. It then falls on the website owner to run updates. Minor updates now happen automatically, but major updates still require administrative action. Updates aside, WordPress cant be held responsible for installation of compromised plugins (which is where most breaches are coming from these days; 3rd party code). WordPress should also not be held responsible for failure to use security certificates (without which, dashboard credentials can be sniffed in plaintext). Hosting is also a website owners decision. The choice of a shared hosting package for example, introduces a great deal of risk (a server compromise on someone elses website could expose all websites on the cluster).

WordPress is the most secure and most vulnerable framework, at the same time

Thats a bold statement. But did you know that 25% of all websites on the internet, are built with WordPress? Furthermore, WordPress' market share varies between 60-65% of all CMS frameworks in use. By numbers alone, that paints a massive target on WordPress implementations. Since WordPress can also be installed by a user with no technical "know-how", a good portion of implementations will be left in their default configurations, making them vulnerable (and easy targets).

Bug fixing in software is an endless process. A study done by WordPress over a period of five years on theme, core and plugin code showed that 80% of all updates were security related. History has shown that the WordPress developers are quick to patch security vulnerabilities. The same cannot be said for other popular CMS systems, which could take weeks or even months to release a patch which WordPress had implemented within 24 hours of disclosure. The quick turn around time for security patches make WordPress a secure platform (provided the site owner runs the update).

Bottom line

No website or web application will ever be 100% secure. The only way to prevent ever getting hacked, is to unplug from the internet. The most a website owner can do, is keep their software up to date, and periodically review security measures to make sure they are sufficient to protect the required assets. But with just a few key security tweaks, your WordPress installation can be orders of magnitude securer. WordPress has an army of developers collaborating and working towards a better framework for their customers.

So its all doom and gloom then... what can you do?

This post will be the first of a series of posts I will be making, going over WordPress security and best practice. At a bare minimum, you can install a trusted security plugin (I can vouch for ithemes security, wordfence, and securi). These plugins help a great deal, I will compare them in a future post.

Feel free to leave your comments, even if its a dispute 😉

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