Wordpress break-in briefly exposes private data

A break-in at the servers of blog site WordPress this week may have briefly exposed some of the site's "sensitive" data, including potentially its users' information. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg said that the server break-ins at Automattic, the company behind WordPress, were at the root level. "Tough note to communicate today: Automattic had a low-level (root) break-in to several of our servers, and potentially anything on those servers could have been revealed," Mullenweg said in a blog post. He said that they have beeen "diligently reviewing logs and records" about the break-in to determine the extent of the information exposed. While Mullenweg said that the information that was exposed appeared to be "limited," he pointed out they are working to re-secure avenues used to gain access. "We presume our source code was exposed and copied. While much of our code is Open Source, there are sensitive bits of our and our partners’ code. Beyond that, however, it appears information disclosed was limited," he explained. Mullenweg reiterated security fundamentals for users of WordPress' blogs. These include:

• Use a strong password, meaning something random with numbers and punctuation.
• Use different passwords for different sites.
• If you have used the same password on different sites, switch it to something more secure.

He also suggested using tools like 1Password, LastPass, and KeePass to make it easy to keep track of different unique logins. "Our investigation into this matter is ongoing and will take time to complete. As I said above, we’ve taken comprehensive steps to prevent an incident like this from occurring again," he said. A story in PC Magazine said WordPress had been a victim of a major denial-of-service attack last March. The PC Magazine story said that the attacks were found to originate in China, although they were originally thought to have come from the Middle East. — TJD, GMA News